Search results

Change in higher education across the globe is taking place at an unprecedented pace. Various groups, especially women, are impacted differently by these changes. Women remain underrepresented in leadership at universities across the globe, and South African higher education is no different. For women to take up senior leadership roles more potently in universities, particularly in the Global South, it is essential that they not only cope with and compete in the patriarchal systems that characterize this sector but are also emboldened to contribute to changing patriarchal hegemony. There are shifts needed in prevailing management styles and leadership discourses toward a pluralistic and inclusive culture, where transformational and equitable leadership cultures become the norm and praxis. Given this context, we assessed the needs of women leaders in the South African higher education sector and designed a program to help shift their experience of themselves and their contexts. This chapter discusses this national executive development program – the Women in Leadership (WiL) program – which was developed and implemented with the aim to advance gender equality and inclusivity in higher education leadership in South Africa. This program aimed to embolden the women leaders in their ability to recognize, address, and impact barriers to gender equality.

Issues of women’s education and empowerment of women have been incorporated in the framing of the role of women in international development from the 1970s, primarily as a response to the liberal feminist movement agenda of the time. This analysis examines the degree to which liberal feminism and liberal feminist theory is reflected in comparative education scholarship in the lead up to and beyond the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The analysis first explores the underpinnings of liberal feminism, which constitutes the ideal embedded in development education for girls and women. It follows up with a reflection on the literature in the field of comparative education that reference liberal feminism framework and feminist theory in exploring educational issues and ways in which the theory is located in the research. Illustration of examples that demonstrate the limits of liberal feminism as a theoretical framework and barriers to the use of liberal feminist theory as an ideological guide are captured in the findings. The search is limited to the six dominant scholarly outlets in the field of comparative education; namely Comparative Education Review (CER), Comparative Education (CE), Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education (Compare), Prospects: Quarterly Review of Comparative Education (Prospects), International Review of Education (IRE), and the International Journal of Educational Development (IJED). Only works that explicitly mention liberal feminism/liberal feminist perspectives are included in the analysis. This research contributes to the acknowledgement of the liberal feminist theory in development education and for the field of comparative education. It will also help with understanding the politics of ideology and representation in scholarship and development interventions.

This chapter is based on data from an international research project entitled ‘Gender Equity in Commonwealth Higher Education’ (GECHE). Funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the Carnegie Corporation of New York from 2003 to 2005, this project examined interventions for gender equity in relation to access, staff development and curriculum transformation in Nigeria, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Uganda. Data were collected via literature and policy review and interview data from a sample size of 200 including students, academic staff, managers and policymakers in the five countries. The key findings suggested that gender equality was promoted by widening participation and affirmative action policy interventions, national and international policy initiatives, and community links and coalitions. Gender equality was being impeded by gender violence, gendered organisational and social cultures and micropolitics, male domination, lack of understanding of diversity, low numbers of women in senior academic and management positions and beliefs in gender neutrality rather than gender awareness.

The intent of this chapter is to discuss women managers as change agents in higher education. It focuses women’s increased access to senior academic management positions in Swedish higher education and investigates to what extent this increase is accompanied by changes to a masculine management norm.

The chapter draws on a study that involved qualitative interviews with 22 women in senior management positions in 10 Swedish higher education institutions.

The analysis highlights how women managers become agents of change by challenging a masculine management norm in a work setting where men have dominated management positions. The women challenged the masculine management norm by their mere presence as women but also by adopting a different management style. It also illustrates the multiple aspects of women’s potential to take on the role as change agent.

The results could benefit the development of gender equality strategies and the making of structural changes in organizations dominated by a masculine managerial norm.

The study is based on unique empirical material. The interviewees are women pioneers in the Swedish Higher Education Sector, contributing to the demographic feminization of senior academic management positions and the organizational restructuring.

We are the midst of accelerated change in the academic workforce. Academic roles, being a resilient mixture of research and education, are differentiating. An education-focused academic role, rather than one solely focused on disciplinary research, is gaining credibility and value. With the rise of the education-focused academic roles, questions are being raised about whether this new form of education-focused academic will continue to be overly represented by women in a new form of “women's work.” In the next decade, as academic roles continue to differentiate, care needs to be taken not to repeat the practice of the last 100 years which has seen gender bias continue. We will present four profiles of education-focused women academics, the snakes and ladders in their careers, and the strategies needed to ensure that women progress with equal recognition in these complex but exciting times.

Women who are the primary caretaker of the home, as a choice or as a necessity, have to negotiate an effective work-life balance and many times, the need to take care of their home results in lost opportunities for career development and advancement (Maki, 2015). For most, the opportunity to capitalize on the missed opportunities will occur after childbearing years (Maki, 2015). This study reconstructed the advancement to executive leadership of women who were employed at four-year, public universities using narrative inquiry and guided by the conceptual framework of social cognitive theory (Andrews, Squire, & Tamboukou, 2013; Bandura, 1989). In this study, six women in higher education were interviewed to discuss work-life balance as it pertains to being an executive leader of a four-year public institution. The participants of this study pinpointed family and work-life balance as important factors for their decision-making process. Balancing work and life can be challenging when you are a person in a leadership position and the degree of difficulty increases when children and family are included. Many women believe that they must choose between their careers and their family. Women postponing their careers for their spouses may not seem abnormal because there tends to be an expectation that male's advancement is prioritized over the woman's (Parker, 2015). As more women are taking on leadership roles, the idea and evolution of establishing and maintaining a strategy for work-life balance becomes a very integral topic and one that needs continuous exploration.