1st Edition
Globalised re/gendering of the academy and leadership
The significance of Higher Education to national knowledge-based economies has made the sector the object of government policies, international monitoring, and corporatization. This radical global restructuring of higher education is gendered in its processes, practices, and effects. Exploring how the re-organisation of the sector has redefined academic, management, and professional roles and identities, this book considers the different impacts of structural change for men and women working at diverse levels of the academy.
Drawing from empirical studies undertaken in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australasia the contributions offer a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including large scale comparative data and case studies. They inform what is a key policy issue in the 21st century – the re-positioning of women in the academy and leadership. Despite a range of institutional equity strategies in which women learnt the ‘rules of the game’, this book shows that structural and cultural barriers – often conceptualised through metaphors such as sticky floors, glass ceilings, chilly climates, or dead-end pipelines – have not disappeared as might be expected as the academy becomes numerically feminized.
Each chapter provides an insight into how historical legacies, cultural contexts, geographic locations, modes of regional and institutional governance, and national policies are mediated and vernacularized through practice by localized gender regimes and orders. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.
Introduction: Globalised re/gendering of the academy and leadership Jill Blackmore, Marita Sánchez-Moreno and Naarah Sawers
1. Women academics and research productivity: an international comparison Sarah Jane Aiston and Jisun Jung
2. Will gender equality ever fit in? Contested, discursive spaces of university reform Katharina Kreissl, Angelika Striedinger, Birgit Sauer and Johanna Hofbauer
3. Emirati women’s higher educational leadership formation under globalisation: culture, religion, politics, and the dialectics of modernisation Eugenie Samier
4. Leadership characteristics and training needs of women and men in charge of Spanish universities
Marita Sánchez-Moreno, Julián López-Yáñez and Mariana Altopiedi
5. Complexities of Vietnamese femininities: a resource for rethinking women’s university leadership practices Van Hanh Thi Do and Marie Brennan
6. Diverse experiences of women leading in higher education: locating networks and agency for leadership within a university in Papua New Guinea Rachel McNae and Kerren Vali
7. Good jobs – but places for women? Pat O’Connor
8. Executive power and scaled-up gender subtexts in Australian entrepreneurial universities Jill Blackmore and Naarah Sawers
9. Faculty peer networks: role and relevance in advancing agency and gender equity KerryAnn O’Meara and Nelly P. Stromquist
Biography
Jill Blackmore is Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education, and Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Futures and Innovation at Deakin University, Australia. She is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Australia. Her research interests include education policy and institutional governance from a feminist perspective; educational restructuring and organisational change; and equity policy related to the work of education professionals. Recently she has focused on disengagement with, and lack of diversity in, university leadership, international education, and graduate employability. She is the author of Educational Leadership and Nancy Fraser (2016) and co-editor of Mobile teachers and curriculum in international schooling (2014, with Arber and Vongalis-Macrow).
Marita Sánchez-Moreno is Professor in the Department of Teaching and School Organisation at the Universidad de Sevilla, Spain. Her research interests include gender and leadership in higher education, and the professional development of these leaders; and educational, cultural, and organisational change, innovation, and improvement. She is a founding member of the Network of Research on Leadership and Improvement in Education, and takes part in the International Successful School Principalship Project, and the international Comenius Multilateral Project Professional Learning through Feedback and Reflection devoted to the training of school leaders.
Naarah Sawers is currently a Research Fellow in the School of Education, and teaches in the School of Communications and Creative Arts, at Deakin University, Australia. Her research spans the fields of children’s literature, education, and studies in higher education. Her most recent book is Critical Fictions: Science, Feminism, and Corporeal Subjectivity (2008). She has written for academic journals in cultural studies, literature, and education.
