Gender and Practice

Insights From the Field

Vasilikie (Vicky) Demos, Marcia Texler Segal, Kristy E. Kelly, Vasilikie Demos, Marcia Texler Segal, Kristy Kelly

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838673857
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

UN Sustainable Development Goal 5: Achieve Gender Equality and Empower All Women and Girls.
In Gender and Practice: Insights from the Field, twelve chapters contribute to the creation of an accessible body of knowledge that looks to provide gender practitioners with examples of what works, and what doesn't, in the attainment of gender equality.
This volume demonstrates the depth and breadth of gender and practice. Looking across countries including Cambodia, India, Kazakhstan, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and the United States, the chapters explore global perspectives and global ramifications. Contributors examine issues and activities related to infusing gender in education, training and practice, and many chapters specifically address one or more of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Including chapters on medical treatment, climate change, non-profit and community organizing, and agriculture, this volume is useful to all those looking to explore current gender research.

PART I

EDUCATION

CHAPTER 1

FEMINIST LEADERSHIP IN THE ACADEMY: EXPLORING EVERYDAY PRAXIS

Kris De Welde, Marjukka Ollilainen and Catherine Richards Solomon¹

ABSTRACT

Feminist leadership and administrative praxis include areas overlooked or devalued by traditional leadership. In this chapter, the authors explore how academic administrators in the United States who self-identify as “feminist” integrate their feminist values into daily praxis, decisions, and implementation – or revision – of institutional policies. The goals of this study are to identify how feminist values inform praxis and how feminist administrators’ praxis produce successful changes. Through in-depth, semi-structured, qualitative interviews with feminist administrators in higher education, the authors find commonalities in feminist values, in how those values shape administrators’ interactions, and how they inform initiatives and policies on which administrators have worked. Feminist administrators rely on values such as transparency, collaboration, inclusivity, empowering others, and being mindful of power and personal biases. These values informed their interactions with faculty, staff, and students as well as formal policies and initiatives, which were infused with feminist principles in their efforts to make academe more just.

Keywords: Feminism; leadership; academia; higher education; administration; praxis

Feminist leadership and administrative praxis include areas overlooked or devalued by traditional leadership. Feminist leaders have concerns about equity and equal opportunity, about inclusivity of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, social class, physical ability, about community building, and about mentorship. It also relates to resistance of the traditional, masculine values embedded in academic practices and instead promotes ethics of care, greater work/life balance, critical reflection, flatter organizational structures, and empowering others to effect change (Barton, 2006; Deem & Ozga, 2000; Hughes, 2000; Mauthner & Edwards, 2010). Feminism as a framework for leadership praxis has the potential to subvert masculine-dominant, bureaucratically structured academic organizations and traditional power structures, and provide spaces for enacting social justice through leadership (Barton, 2006; Deem & Ozga, 2000). This chapter explores how academic administrators in the United States who self-identify as feminist integrate their feminist values into praxis, including their daily practices, decisions, and implementation – or revision – of institutional policies. Through in-depth, semi-structured, and qualitative interviews with 27 feminist administrators in higher education, we examine how feminism provides a working ideology, especially in the context of increasing managerial trends in academia (Acker & Wagner, 2019). We investigate how feminist administrators define their feminist principles, how they incorporate those principles into their daily interactions, and how those principles inform policies or initiatives on which they have worked. Our goal is to identify how feminist praxis has produced successful changes in US academia.

CAN FEMINIST LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE ACADEMIC MANAGERIALISM?

Our definition of feminist leadership focuses on the goals of promoting gender equity, social justice, and intersectional understanding of all forms of inequality, including race, ethnicity, class, disability, age, and sexuality (Barton, 2006; Deem & Ozga, 2000; Hughes, 2000; Mauthner & Edwards, 2010). Based on these objectives, feminist academic leadership stands in opposition to current trends in academia toward market orientation, a shift that is deeply gendered (De Welde & Stepnick, 2015; Thomas & Davies, 2002). This corporate, neoliberal higher education model emphasizes market competition, efficiency, dedication to career at the expense of family, and is associated with increased stress for workers and limitations to academic freedom (Deem, 2003; Metcalf & Slaughter, 2008; Ollilainen & Solomon, 2014; Thomas & Davies, 2002). The US universities are facing a precarious existence with declining public financing and support, “underprepared students, downsizing, heavy faculty workloads, growing number of adjunct faculty, tenure systems under fire, and greater demand for accountability and productivity” (Zahorski & Cognard, 1999, p. 2). Similar developments exist across universities in much of the industrialized world, including Canada and Australia (Wyn, Acker, & Richards, 2000) and European countries (Bendl & Schmidt, 2012; Kallio, Kallio, Tienari, & Hyvönen, 2016; Mauthner & Edwards, 2010; Parson & Priola, 2013; Rasmussen, 2015; Thomas & Davies, 2002). One of the key components in making universities more efficient is to instill competition among people, programs, and departments, resulting in individuals focusing on the survival of their own career or program (Acker & Wagner, 2019; Thomas & Davies, 2002). In an increasingly divisive atmosphere, academic units and faculty begin seeing each other as competitors – instead of colleagues and allies – over diminishing resources. In this environment, what is the role of administrators whose values are feminist even when some decisions they must make cannot be? We propose that feminist principles – and feminist administrators – occupy a strategic position for contesting higher education’s move toward academic capitalism and managerialism (e.g., Cole, Hassel, & Schell, 2017; Metcalf & Slaughter, 2008, 2011).

Since the first signs of neoliberalism and managerialism in academia, scholars have explored the potential of feminist leadership to confront and resist these trends. Findings document feminist leaders transforming higher education from the inside, more often through incremental changes in policy and practice than radical disruptions. The practice of deliberate feminist organizational transformation originates with the so-called “femocrats” in Australia who, in the 1970s, entered government bureaucracy at senior levels to “influence policies that advance women’s status in society” (Parson & Priola, 2013, p. 583). However, because they were willing to change organizations from the inside (without a radical agenda), femocrats were shunned by women’s movement at the time for being too moderate. Similarly, contemporary academic administrators who wish to create change must manage many constituencies at once. On the one hand, they work toward feminist goals, including making gender inequality visible and promoting feminist research. On the other hand, the academic “game” requires them to play along, adopt the dominant discourse, and assimilate to the prevailing (neoliberal) culture (Parsons & Priola, 2013, p. 586).

Academic managerialism bears gendered consequences as it creates a time-intensive work culture and makes it especially difficult for women with family care obligations to succeed in senior positions. This “macho-masculine,” competitive, and individualist culture encourages profitable knowledge, high quality publications in certain journals, and prestigious grants, all of which can take resources away from humanitarian concerns and stand in direct opposition to feminist discourses on equity, empathy, and collegiality (Mauthner & Edwards, 2010, p. 485). The rise of managerialism also has brought about the weakening of faculty influence in university governance (Cole et al., 2017). Cole et al. (2017) suggest that “applying the feminist label to the space of shared governance operates in the context of opening access, including diverse voices, building relationships, sharing knowledge, and achieving goals collectively” (p. 15). We propose that feminist administrators are in a unique strategic position to confront these trends and build bridges among people and units. How they do that – their praxis – is at the center of our analysis. Given the increased competition for resources among faculty, a market orientation focused on performance and output instead of people, process, and community, and the weakening role of faculty governance, we seek to uncover what feminist administrative praxis looks like and how it is enacted at both the micro (interaction) and macro (policies/initiatives) levels.

METHODS

Our dataset consists of 27 semi-structured interviews with academic administrators who self-identify as feminist and represent a variety of organizational units and levels. Interviewees hold positions at the president and vice-president levels, they are deans, associate deans, provosts and associate provosts, as well as department chairs or heads. The size and type of institutions they represent vary from small liberal arts colleges to large public universities. Administrators who volunteered to participate in this study are white (21), African American (4), Latina (2), and Asian American (1). Eighteen women held degrees in the social sciences, nine in the humanities, and one in science.

The convenience sample of interviewees was generated through a process of snowball sampling, where contacts referred the authors to new contacts and so on. Co-authors conducted interviews in person, via Skype, and by phone. The interviews were approximately one hour long and covered career paths, the definition of feminist leadership, how feminism shaped work practice, and the extent to which practices were conscious and named as feminist. The interview audio files were transcribed verbatim.

All quotations from the interviews have been anonymized in this chapter. As a basic tenet of feminist qualitative inquiry, we do not impose a specific definition of feminism on our interviewees. Through the interview questions, we want to capture the nuances of how participants themselves interpret their actions. We are interested in all forms of ideas and initiatives that our informants perceive as feminist in the higher education context. This casts our project as exploratory with possibilities to discover praxes that pertain particularly to US higher education at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Analysis. The co-authors collaborated on analysis of our interview data by coding inductively and focusing analysis on themes informing our primary research questions. Specifically, we read interview transcripts and developed codes that dealt with feminism and the work of administrators. We continuously shared insights from our individual coding, returning to interviews to recode them with common codes in mind. We grouped codes into larger themes that illustrated the various dimensions of how feminism informs administrators’ praxes.

Limitations. Although we strove to have racial-ethnic diversity in our sample and include men, the majority of participants we interviewed identified as white women. Thus, we cannot speak much to the experiences of administrators from under-represented racial-ethnic groups or administrators who do not identify as women. The current diversity in our sample suggests that these identities would present different aspects of feminist administrative praxis that we are unable to address fully in this chapter.

FINDINGS

Feminist Values in Leadership

Respondents described feminist leadership as transparent, collaborative, inclusive, empowering, and mindful of power and biases. They incorporated these into their leadership praxis and interactions (described below) in deliberate ways, but also in ways that seemed “natural.” Feminism served as a catchall, or a “big tent,” for attention to issues of social justice, intersectionality, and minimizing academia’s hierarchical aspects. Although we present these values as distinct, they worked synergistically, each influencing other aspects. However, not all respondents spoke about consciously imbuing their administrative praxis with feminism. Several expressed that they were “naturally” practicing feminism in their administrative work and did not consciously think about whether each action, decision, or policy was feminist.

Inclusivity

A cornerstone of feminist values for our respondents was inclusivity. Inclusivity was multifaceted: access to higher education for individuals who historically have been disenfranchised or excluded; recruiting, hiring, and supporting diverse faculty and administrative workforces; openness to non-traditional ideas and knowledge production; and listening to others’ concerns (whether students, faculty, or staff). Helen Daniels (president)² shared her thoughts about academe as a place of inclusion, not just for ideas but for people from under-represented groups. She said,

The other values that I have are in providing an environment where students can get an education no matter their gender, no matter their race, no matter what their perspectives are, in a way that they’re treated equitably and that they’re not harmed in any way.

Feminist administrators endeavored to create such inclusive institutions through interactions and initiatives (discussed below).

Empowerment

Feminist administrators recognized that it was not enough to practice inclusivity and promote diverse representation. An important component of enacting feminism was to empower others: to recognize the efforts of others, give others credit for their work, and help others develop rewarding careers and pursue opportunities for advancement. Many respondents mentioned that empowering others was one of the most rewarding aspects of their careers. Mary Hamilton (ombuds person) summarized:

It’s recognizing what are the best qualities and aspects of whoever it is and incorporating them and then helping others to grow that within themselves … that’s the real reward to realize that you’ve had a career in which … you have tried to guide and show people how you can be the best you can be.

Empowering women and other under-represented individuals results in an inclusive and dynamic academy, thus achieving a major feminist goal.

Mindfulness of Power and Biases

Unlike traditional forms of leadership in a neoliberal system, feminist administrators were keenly aware of their own power and biases. Thus, they tried not to abuse power or be influenced by personal biases that might circumvent initiatives for the greater good. For example, Evelyn Reynolds (provost) was awa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Gender and Practice: Introduction to Insights from the Field
• Part I. Education
• Part II. Training
• Part III. Practice
• Index