Femina Academica: women ‘confessing’ leadership in Higher Education

ABSTRACT

This contribution explores how different policy discourses produce site-specific representations and self-representations of gender and leadership, which may reveal forms of subjectivation as well as spaces of resistance to hegemonic discourses. I will consider two different Higher Education policy systems: the UK system that since the 1980s has undergone rapid and radical changes that introduced market-oriented reforms profoundly influenced by the managerialist discourse in the form of New Public Management; the Italian system that still remains rooted in the bureaucratic and professional discourses despite some timid attempts to import the ‘managerial recipes’. This contribution focuses on the construction of gender and leadership in different academic contexts ‘mapping’ different aspects connected to the gendered self-narration of leadership. For this purpose, nine interviews of women occupying roles as middle managers in one of the largest universities of the South of Italy and in different universities in the UK, are discussed and compared.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• leadership
• Higher Education
• self-narration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Emanuela Spanò completed her PhD at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy. Her current interests of research concern gender patterns and identity building in the academia field, biographical research, and the intersection of individual biography and society.

Notes

1 The diversity of the HE contexts selected is also evident when we speak about middle managers. In the British context they are caught in ‘discursive tensions’ between the managerialist discourse, which press them to become entrepreneurs, their professional heritage, and the wider process of UK universities re-regulation through deregulation, and centralisation through decentralisation (Morley 2003). Differently, Italian middle management failed to see a coherent redefinition of its role in a managerialist sense. Critically reading this process, it is possible to note the Italian case represents a peculiar and hybrid form of re-centralisation without a real decentralisation, where the State is currently re-centralising professional appointments while, at the same time, the power of the ‘academic oligarchy’ has been reinforced to the detriment of the strategic steering capacity of university management.

2

Discourses are about the things that can be said, and thought, but also about who can speak, when, where and with what authority. Discourses imply the meaning and use of propositions and words. Thus, certain possibilities of thought are constructed. Words are ordered and combined in particular ways and other combinations are displaced or excluded. (Ball 2006, 48)

3 The ‘middle’ of the formal university structure in UK usually comprises the Deans of Faculties and/or Heads of Schools or Departments, depending on the university, while in Italy refers to the ‘direttori di dipartimento’. As noted above, these positions are ‘middle management’ in the executive line but also expected to be part of the academic collegium.

4 For Morley a ‘proof’ of this absence is that curiously in a culture of measurement and audit in HE, women’s representation in different roles and grades is not always perceived as sufficiently important to measure, monitor or map comparatively (Morley 2013).

5 In the EU, for example, She Figures (2009) noted how women’s academic careers remain characterised by strong vertical segregation.

6 In this context, and following Watt (1996), I define myth as a popular narration that embodies or symbolises some of the fundamental values of a specific society.

7 The term ‘emotional intelligence’ gained prominence in the 1995 book by that title, written by the author, psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman. He defined emotional intelligence as the array of skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance. More in general, the term is used to describe the ability of an individual to recognise their own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different feelings and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour.

8 In this sense, the persistence of the famous mantra think-manager-think-male (Sinclair 2004) linking the ideal leader as male and masculine paradoxically co-exists with those popular discourses on ‘women’s styles of leadership’.

9 As Putman and Mumby point out:

Rationality surfaces as the positive while emotionality is viewed as a negative. The prevalence of these dualities contributes to treating emotion as a form of labour, or as a tool of exerting influence in organizational settings. In organizations, emotions are consistently devalued and marginalized while rationality is privileged as an ideal of organizational life. Moreover, the devaluing of emotions and the elevating of rationality results in a particular moral order, one that reflects the politics of the social interaction rather than a universal norm for behaviour. Rationality is typically seen as objective, orderly, and mental while emotionality reflects the chaotic and bodily drives. ( 2000, 39–40)

10 According to de Lauretis, ‘Gender as a form of representation and self-representation is constructed by various social technologies, power relations, discourses, epistemologies as well as everyday practices (technologies of gender)’ (1987, 2).

11 I translated the Italian word ‘filibustiera’ with the word ‘scoundrel’. This particular term is usually reserved for men similarly to the Italian one that expresses the translation of the masculine image of the ‘pirate’: a ‘soldier of fortune’, hardened in getting what he wants. It is probably no coincidence that to describe this kind of ‘masculine’ attitude the figure of the ‘filibustiera’ has been chosen.

12 In this case the Italian word ‘Carabiniere’ – Italian police – has been translated as ‘police constable’ in order to keep the a-gendered connotation of this figure.