The Journey of Women Leaders in Higher Education: An Analysis of Narratives of Women Overcoming Bias and Adversity

Abstract

It is a fairly recent phenomenon for women in higher education to achieve senior levels of leadership, and yet many women still do not make it beyond the Provost or Vice President roles to go on to lead universities. Less than 30% of university presidents today are women (Gagliardi et al., 2017, para. 6)., and less than 5% of those are women of color (Gagliardi et al., 2017, para. 9). Narrative research was undertaken to explore how women leaders in higher education overcame the adversity and bias that lead to these non-equitable statistics. The eight narrative interviews with women leaders in academia are showcased in order to better understand how women overcame these challenges to rise to senior leadership positions within a university. Open-ended questions elicited personal responses from the interviewees. Through the thematic analysis of narratives of their journey to leadership overarching themes were illuminated, as well as personal resilience practices and institutional measures that could enhance women’s capacity for overcoming adversity and bias in leadership. Specifically, four core themes emerged from the statements collected in the interviews: what women are up against, how they overcome it, how they engage others, and how they move forward. Theoretically, this narrative analysis has been conducted through the framework of feminism, ecofeminism, and transformative leadership to identify how women leaders overcome adversity and cultivate resilience.