Lost Leaders: Women in the Global Academy
Professor Louise Morley, Director, Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of Sussex, UK.
Centre for the Study of Higher Education seminar
Grimond Lecture Theatre 3, 12th June 2014, 4.30-6.00pm
Abstract
A powerful cultural ideology has emerged in higher education reform globally that suggests that the essential ingredient in successful organisational transformation is that of leadership. The leaderist turn assumes that individual agency, unimpeachable characteristics and structural positions will result in some organisational members being authorized to exert and display managerial power. There are questions about who self-identifies, and is identified by existing power elites, as having leadership legitimacy, with women having achieved differing, but generally low rates of success in entering senior academic leadership in different national locations. This presentation will engage critically with the international literature and explanatory frameworks that have analysed women’s absences from senior leadership positions in higher education and with empirical data collected internationally for British Council funded research on women in higher education leadership. Much of the global literature assumes that counting more women into existing systems, structures and cultures is an unquestioned good, and an indicator of vertical career success. There is scant discussion of women’s resistance to entering leadership in post neo-liberal and austerity-driven workplace cultures. It is questionable whether leadership in today’s managerialised global academy is a transformational opportunity and object of desire for academic women, or whether indeed, it is a form of incarceration in an identity cage.
Louise Morley is Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER) (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/ ) at the University of Sussex. Her previous posts were at the Institute of Education, University of London, the University of Reading and the Inner London Education Authority. She is an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Fellow of the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE), and a Senior Visiting Fellow at The Centre for Gender Excellence (GEXcel), University of Örebro, Sweden.
Louise has an international profile in the field of sociology of higher education studies. Her research and publication interests focus on international higher education policy, gender, equity, women and leadership, micropolitics, quality, and power.