Abstract
This book examines women’s leadership in universities; its contribution, complexities and challenges, in Australia and New Zealand. The author explores leadership through 30 senior women’s narratives and 25 academic women’s subtle understanding. The author, a feminist academic who has occupied four formal senior leadership roles across three different countries, identifies negotiating in and around the gendered culture as the hardest challenge facing female leaders across Western institutions. Fitzgerald appears as a commentator or interpreter for women’s leadership lives, and in doing so she builds on Bateson’s (1989) work in using a conflicting presentation from different lives rather than a single life story to show how female leaders and academics view their experiences and examine common grounds.
The book begins by emphasizing Virginia Woolf’s (1957) metaphoric use of unfurnished rooms as spaces that women earned and are actively furnishing with beliefs and behaviours. Two folds of perception of women’s leadership roles in higher education are identified. First is the negative shadow in the form of female leaders adopting internalized masculinist practices and engaging in a level of aggression. Second is the women of indigenous origin and of ethnic minority facing hurdles in the form of further assimilation and marginalization.
The following chapters expose leadership myths. Some of these myths are as follows.
(1) Women’s leadership styles being too feminist and lacking assertive, tough and masculine behaviour that is needed to compete with male colleagues, thus implying a weakness and inability to lead. This further alienates women from taking part, thinking they lack such skills. The author makes distinct notes about the use of language in these findings and descriptions; ‘the rules of the game’, ‘winning and losing’, ‘punished’, ‘boys' club’, ‘blokes’ and ‘queen bee’. Some of these terms and phrases are analysed as traps and dangerous terrain women are entangled in because such labels dominantly undermine women’s agency in the field and characterize them as victims. Others are related to the conflicting expectations of style and role played by female leaders.
(2) The myth that the ‘battle has been won’ and ‘equal opportunities exist’. Increased numbers of women in leadership (taken as evidence of equal opportunity) do not indicate sufficient qualitative gender equality (contributing to real change) because women are still under represented. Some countries that have encouraged inclusion policies still lack women in leadership positions. An in-depth analysis of the factors contributing to low numbers is displayed through leaders’ and academic women’s narratives. The legislations and equality regulations are only a façade. Institutions’ regulations of equality and inclusion policies as infrastructure are built on masculine rules where women’s identities, femininity and styles of leadership have no place or consideration. For women to climb to leadership positions, they need to confront gendered structural and cultural barriers on an institutional and legislative level, which is benchmarked and measured by standards set by men and immediately works to disadvantage women.
(3) The contribution of new managerialism to new career advantages for women are mostly focused on institutional housekeeping that does little to challenge the masculine model of management. Women who make it to the top lose connections with other women in the workplace. The author pictures women leaders who do not ‘play the game’ as trapped in a ‘spider’s web’ or shoved into housekeeping jobs instead of decision-making positions. Fitzgerald links this with the feminization of middle management and freeing male colleagues to focus on more powerful leadership positions away from domestic tasks. An evaluation of the benefits of women’s leadership training programme is presented as a further exclusion and a one size ‘fit for all’ model that further alienates white women let alone indigenous women.
The author tackles the insider/outsider discourse in depth: women risk losing their alliances with their wider network and become exiled from their own sex by adopting masculine leaders’ behaviours. They may actually become competitors for positions and be alienated from each other. Women cannot win as leaders because both male and female colleagues are waiting for them to fail. Indigenous women have to fight even harder through gendered and racist layers. In the author’s opinion, the connection with the physical, spiritual and geographical space and place is helpful for indigenous women leaders as they navigate between two cultures and two gendered worlds, which is a lesson learned for other women leaders in different contexts.
The author concludes by an overarching examination of four crossroads that can have a high impact on women’s leadership in higher education: numerical impact, influencing policy, cultural change and leadership roles. In response, five challenges are proposed: fracturing the gendered structural and cultural barriers, retaining women in middle leadership positions, elevating the contradictory effects created by women in senior leadership; interrogating the white culture dominance, and finally locating a theoretical tool for negotiating complexities and dimensions of female leadership. These five issues ask for further future research and propose continuous debate around gendered cultures and institutional structure. Such propositions act as an agent for change and an invitation for the readers' thoughts in any context where the book is read.
This book is about the experiences, struggles and the feeling of exclusion women face as they ascend the ladder of senior leadership posts in academia. It represents the stories of white women as minorities and indigenous women in their rare presence as leaders. The narratives in this book are powerful tools for empowering other women because they stimulate thinking about their own context and future aspirations in relation to other women. Furthermore, the book contributes to understanding the needs and styles of a specific group of leaders in higher education. What the book seem to overstate though, is the masculine ‘plot’ or ‘rules’, which could be debated by academic men and women in different contexts and experiences. What the author is trying to convey is a segment from the whole and in a certain geographical location, but this also could be generalized to western higher education institutions with supportive evidence and further research.