The rules of the game: women and the leaderist turn in higher education

Abstract

This paper engages with Diana Leonard's writing on how gender is constituted in the academy. It offers an international review of feminist knowledge on how gender and power interact with leadership in higher education. It interrogates the ‘leaderist turn’ or how leadership has developed into a popular descriptor and a dominant social and organisational technology in academia. It considers some of the explanatory frameworks that have been marshalled to analyse women's leadership aspirations and absences. In doing so, it attempts to unmask the ‘rules of the game’ that lurk beneath the surface rationality of academic meritocracy. It also poses questions about the relentless misrecognition of women's leadership capacities and suggests the need for an expanded lexicon of leadership with which to move into the university of the future.

Keywords:

• leadership identities
• mis-recognition
• women's absences
• feminist redistribution of knowledge

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers, Miriam David and Debbie Epstein for their editorial guidance, Valerie Hey and other CHEER colleagues for the rich discussions on the above topic and the British Council and Leadership Foundation for Higher Education for their interest in this research.