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Literature around the careers of female academics is targeted mainly toward identifying and examining career progression inhibitors, while the drivers appear largely unexplored. This paper aims to contribute to contemporary knowledge by identifying drivers to the career progression of female academics in Australia. With COVID-19 currently impacting the careers of female academics this knowledge can assist universities and human resource (HR) professionals in developing policies and practices to better facilitate female academic career progression.

Empirically this paper draws on a qualitative study of 18 male and 29 female academics, as well as nine senior university stakeholders. The authors employed semi-structured interviews and a novel methodology, Draw, Write, Reflect.

In line with attribution theory, senior stakeholders mainly identified organisational efforts, including leadership, gender equity endeavours, recruitment and promotion approaches, as well as a construct known as “relative to opportunity considerations”, as drivers of female academics’ career progression. Female academics, however, largely attributed their career progression to personal factors, such as family support, informal mentoring, and determination and persistence.

The findings have implications for universities and HR practices seeking to facilitate female academic career progression. Implementation of the drivers identified may enhance female academics’ abilities to progress their careers.

By focussing on the drivers of, rather than the barriers to, female academic careers, the research is novel in its identification of a previously unexplored mismatch between organisational attribution and individual attribution of career progression drivers thereby advancing knowledge of gender differences in academic careers.

This paper aims to investigate the career experiences of female academics in a Western and in an Indian cultural setting in order to gain an in‐depth understanding of the factors contributing to their career progression. The paper also examines the factors such as national culture, gender stereotypes and leadership, work and family conflict, mentoring and informal networks that impact on the career progression of women academics in two different cultural settings, namely Mauritius and Australia.

Thirty in‐depth interviews from two universities were used.

The findings illustrate that the barriers to progression are remarkably similar to women from both universities despite their different cultural background. Women in the Mauritian context face a considerably more conservative cultural climate that may negatively impact on their career progression. Women from both cultural settings face significant barriers to career progression in their academic roles.

This paper compares Australian and Mauritian women academics experience in academia. The paper also offers practical guidance that can be used by management and women academics to facilitate career progression of women in academia.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a process model, focusing on the detailed analysis of the requirement of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) standards related to Participants area, for implementation in a business school setting.

The paper presents an articulated procedure for the development of the process model. The study adopted a three-step approach for developing the process model.

The process model has provided a systemic approach to process design and implementation of AACSB accreditation standards related to Participants area in a business school environment. The process model was developed and applied over the course of systematic reviews in a business school setting.

The present study has developed the process model catering to the requirements of the AACSB standards related to Participants area only. In the near future, the authors intend to develop processes for the remaining areas of AACSB standards.

The present work attempts to develop a process model to meet the requirements of the standards related to Participants area. Academic institutions can benefit from the process model whether they are planning to implement AACSB standards for accreditation or are interested in changing their current processes following AACSB standards.

In the highly gendered academic sector, womens’ high participation rates have not translated into equal career progression with men. Existing literature suggests that early career publication success is a good indicator of long-term publication success. This research is intended to provide a better understanding of whether the notions of success espoused by neo-liberal universities align with the subjective measures of what constitutes academic success for women ECRs (early career researchers).

The study examines the perceptions of nine successful women ECRs at an Australian university. It uses collaborative autoethnography with thematic analysis of participants’ self-reflective narratives on being a successful ECR.

Five themes were identified. One focussed on objective academic success, which included publications, grants and citations. The other four themes – living a balanced life, making a difference, labour of love and freedom and flexibility – offered more subjective views of success. These included: research making a contribution to society, undertaking research they are passionate about, having autonomy in their role and achieving work-life balance.

The findings demonstrate that women define success in broader terms than neo-liberal universities, and future studies should consider these divergent definitions. Universities committed to equality should understand differences in how women may approach career progress and incorporate this into support processes and in alignment of individual and university goals.

This research offers unique insights into the experience of post-doctoral employment for women in the academic environment and the factors influencing their success in this early career phase.

Women remain under-represented in leadership positions in both clinical medicine and medical education, despite a rapid increase in the proportion of women in the medical profession. This chapter explores potential reasons for this under-representation and how it can be ameliorated, drawing on a range of international literatures, theories and practices. We consider both the ‘demand’ for and ‘supply’ of women as leaders, by examining: how evolving theories of leadership help to explain women’s’ leadership roles and opportunities, how employment patterns theory and gender schemas help to explain women’s career choices, how women aspiring to leadership can be affected by the ‘glass ceiling’ and the ‘glass cliff’ and the importance of professional development and mentoring initiatives. We conclude that high-level national strategies will need to be reinforced by real shifts in culture and structures before women and men are equally valued for their leadership and followership contributions in medicine and medical education.

This paper examines the experiences of a team of female academics (teaching a large cohort of undergraduate students) and the coping mechanisms used to combat the challenges they confront in the Australian higher education sector.

Using a reflective autoethnographic method and strengths perspective, the authors share experiences as female professionals whose intersectional identities presented challenges that extend beyond those typically found in the current higher education setting.

The individualized nature of academic work exacerbates the systemic marginalization of female academics. Adopting a flock culture serves as a support network for addressing the various intersectional challenges. The authors liken the “flock cultural approach” to a “sisterhood” where individuals impacted by intersectional challenges build a strong and cohesive unit to support each other by utilizing their combined strengths to create positive synergy to cope with ongoing workplace challenges.

The study highlights the benefit of the strengths perspective to understand how female academics with intersectional identities can overcome the challenges of their highly individualized profession.

This paper highlights the importance of building team-based work, cultivating collective achievement and high trust in a highly individualistic profession.

Using the strength perspective, the authors disrupt the conventional and currently narrow usage of sisterhood to help develop strong, adaptive, flexible and responsive bonds among diverse female academics. The findings point to how using a “flock culture” – a membership-based philosophy – became the key support mechanism for the marginalized groups, empowering them to confront the systemic barriers within their profession.

First, the findings of this study are shaped by the intersections of factors such as ethnicity, age, race, religion and mode of employment, which all influences the participants’ lived experiences. Second, this study contributes to the transnational feminist movement by unveiling the contextualized barriers that junior academic females from various migrant backgrounds face and identify how they synergized their collective strengths to survive the challenging academic environment. Third, using the strength perspective, the authors disrupt the conventional and currently narrow usage of sisterhood to help develop strong, adaptive, flexible and responsive bonds among diverse female academics.

Identity, positioning and possibilities intersect differently for South Asian women in white academia. Within a broader migrant community that defines Australian life, these identities and positioning imply great possibility, but pursuing such pathways within academia is a walk on the last strand of resilience. This paper explores this tension of possibilities and constraints, using hope theory to highlight the cognitive resistance evident in the narratives of three South Asian women in Australian academia.

The authors use collaborative autoethnography to share their narratives of working in Australian universities at three different stages of careers, utilising Snyder's model of hope theory to interrogate their own goal-setting behaviours, pathways and agentic thinking.

The authors propose that hope as a cognitive state informs resistance and enables aspirations to contribute within academia in meaningful ways whilst navigating the terrain of inequitable structures.

The authors' use of hope theory as a lens on the intersectional experiences of career making, building and progression is a new contribution to scholarship on marginalised women in white academe and the ways in which the pathways of resistance are identified.

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight how universities got into the predicament in which they currently find themselves in, or somewhat planned to be in, in the 2020s. The historical account outlines the purpose of higher education and who it was for throughout the last few centuries, before a more in-depth analysis of the last few decades will highlight how, and why, neoliberal and subsequently managerial aspects of leadership and performance metrics crept into universities before an analysis of the last 5–10 years, including the onset and consequences of COVID, will demonstrate that many ‘COVID recovery plans’ around staff cuts and course reforms were already in place before COVID, but it was COVID that allowed these plans in most cases to be escalated.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of a number of factors such as high school major, high school score, gender, Stat105, Maths I, Maths II grades, and grade point average (GPA) on students' academic performance in an introductory operations research (OR) course at the department of Business Administration – College of Business and Economics at the UAE University.

All students who completed the introductory OR course during the fall and spring semesters of the academic years 2005/2006 and 2006/2007 were chosen. Collected data were analyzed using correlation and stepwise multiple regression.

The results indicate that significant correlations exist between OR grade and GPA, maths I grade, maths II grade, and stat 105 grade. Results also show that there is statistically significant difference between the performance, measured by grade, in OR of males and females. There is also statistically significant difference in performance in OR between students majoring in art and those majoring in science in high school. Regression analysis indicates that GPA is the most significant predictor of students' performance in the OR course.

This paper is first study to examine the influence of a number of factors on students' performance in the OR course in the developing countries in general and the UAE in particular. It has implications for both decision makers and academicians.

Social science doctoral graduates increasingly are moving into higher education research positions yet the nature of these roles is under researched. The purpose of this paper is to compare the experiences of research staff (RS) and doctoral students (DS), to bring an awareness of the extent to which doctoral experience can be preparation for research roles.

This research adopts a narrative perspective. Using multi‐method data collection the authors compared seven RS and seven DS from the social sciences, capturing their experiences during the first year of a longitudinal study. Analysis involved developing case summaries and thematic coding.

The findings detail similarities in the work undertaken by each group; show that passionate thought for academic work is rooted early in academic life; and illustrate that status is more complex and fluid than previously noted, regardless of role.

Numbers are small; however, although attrition is a possibility, this longitudinal approach should allow us to explore further our notions of doctoral experience as researcher preparation, as participants move from doctoral study into research positions.

This is a rare account of a comparison between RS and DS. The paper argues that the experiences of RS are not discrete and specific only to their role but are part of the same journey as that undertaken by DS.