Gendered games in academic leadership

Abstract

This article looks at women’s efforts to construct an academic leadership career. It is not a study of women’s leadership in general but one that takes place in what Bourdieu calls the academic field. Drawing from an in‐depth interview study of 31 women from faculties of education who occupy managerial positions in universities in Canada, Australia or Britain, I focus on four contrasting case studies. For some women it is possible to build a satisfying academic leadership career, while for others, the surrounding contradictions encourage a more or less graceful end to leadership ambitions. I question the circumstances under which women attempting to construct academic leadership careers will be ‘fish in water’ or show a ‘feel for the game’, as well as the potential and problems of the game metaphor itself in this context.

Keywords:

• women
• leadership
• management
• academic
• career
• Bourdieu

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants in the study for their cooperation, the journal reviewers for their ideas and Dr Jo‐Anne Dillabough for comments on the draft and for piquing my interest in Bourdieu.

Notes

1. Papers from the conference are often submitted for consideration to the journal International Studies in Sociology of Education.

2. There are many variations in terminology across the countries. Positions referred to as management in Australia and Britain are often described as administration (sometimes academic administration) in Canada. ‘Leaders’ seems to be a relatively recent term of choice in academe across countries. Similarly, academics called faculty members in Canada are likely to be titled staff or academic staff in the other two countries. Heads of department in Australia and Britain will usually be termed departmental chairs in Canada.

3. The one exception taught courses and did research on education, but was in an interdisciplinary faculty.

4. Naidoo (2004, 458) states that later work by Bourdieu absorbed both types into ‘academic capital’.

5. According to Grenfall (2007), ‘The whole of Bourdieu’s “sociology of education” is predicated on the relationship between habitus and field: the way the two interrelate in education through configurations of capital – especially cultural capital – and how their “complicity” functions to provide a system of reproduction within the social class hierarchy’ (127).

6. Acker and Dillabough (2007) write: ‘[Bourdieu’s concept of ] symbolic domination, as we use it here, refers to active yet often invisible social processes which lead to the reproduction and recontextualisation of historically coded elements of gender (e.g., woman as “housewife”, “servant to the state”) across space and time, in the university as elsewhere’ (299).

7. Canada has a significant French‐speaking population in Quebec and in parts of other provinces and is officially bi‐lingual.

8. However, in interviews with Vice‐Chancellors in Australia and the UK, Bagilhole and White (2008, 6) found some of the women claiming they encountered more sexism in these very senior roles than in previous positions. Perhaps there are ‘no holds barred’ when it comes to persons perceived as wielding great power.

9. The leadership development programs for women (and other development programs for leaders) that are widespread in Australia are a good start, although it may be easier to encourage women into leadership than to change an entrenched culture (Tessens 2008). Nevertheless, I would contend that more emphasis needs to be placed on support for women once they are in post and not necessarily through organised programs.