Chairing and caring: gendered dimensions of leadership in academe

Abstract

This article uses three frames of analysis, each with gendered implications, to interpret the author's narrative of experience as a department chair (head of department) in a Canadian university from 1999 to 2002. The narrative is based not only on memory but on transcripts of interviews conducted with the author at various points during her term as chair. The three frames are: (1) learning leadership; (2) surviving organisations; and (3) performing leadership. The methodology is an unusual one, a mix of personal narrative with theory and literature, an approach that demonstrates the relative merits of different theoretical perspectives when applied to an account of experience as well as the difficulty of settling on one ‘true’ analysis. Throughout the discussion, a ‘critical incident’ is repeated several times in slightly varied ways, in order to illustrate how different analytical frames can lead to different interpretations. The conclusion considers the implications of the analysis for understanding the gendered experience of academic leadership.

Keywords:

• higher education
• management
• leadership
• women
• narratives
• identities

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mary Fuller and Johanna Wyn for conducting the interviews with me that were used in this article and Jo-Anne Dillabough, Victoria Kannen and two anonymous referees for important and helpful comments.

Notes

Another version of this ‘story’ appears in Acker (2008).

‘Junior faculty’ refers to individuals near the start of their academic careers and usually not yet having achieved tenure; a tenure review in this university that, if successful, will lead to a permanent position generally takes place during the fifth year of an appointment.

‘The [Canadian] Employment Equity Act defines visible minorities as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour”. The visible minority population consists mainly of the following groups: Chinese, South Asian, Black, Arab, West Asian, Filipino, Southeast Asian, Latin American, Japanese and Korean’ (Statistics Canada 2010). The term is controversial as it amalgamates many diverse groups and implies that ‘visibility’ is judged from the perspective of those who are white.

This argument could be challenged in cases where the ‘man’ is minoritized in some way, but as different facets of identity are not predictably combined to produce advantage or disadvantage, I would venture that the ‘man’ advantage is predominant.