Abstract
In this article, I argue that women in senior leadership positions in universities continue to face a number of tensions and ambiguities in their everyday working lives. Drawing on the metaphors of ‘looking good’ and ‘being good’, I highlight the gendered assumptions that senior women encounter. As senior leaders, women are simultaneously required to negotiate an inherently masculine culture yet at the same time are expected to exercise a level of femininity. Their physical presence, appearance, clothing, gestures, and behaviours are central to the bodily exercise of leadership. As the data presented illustrate, women’s leadership bodies and bodily performances reflect gendered institutional norms and assumptions about how leaders should look and act.
Highlights
In Australia and elsewhere, there has been a steady rise in the numbers of women in leadership positons in higher education, women continue to be under-represented at senior levels [1]
Women leaders are located in an ambiguous and paradoxical position: they occupy leadership roles historically held by men in an institutional culture in which femininity remains an expectation
Women leaders operate within gendered contexts whereby they are concurrently expected to demonstrate femininities associated with being a woman (‘look good’) and perform feminine behaviours (‘be good’) through bodies socially perceived to be female
Summary
In Australia and elsewhere, there has been a steady rise in the numbers of women in leadership positons in higher education, women continue to be under-represented at senior levels [1]. In a hyper masculine and competitive environment, such as a university, women must manage their ‘out of place’ bodies as well as prevailing expectations about how that body ought to look and perform. This further requires women to ‘be good’ and engage in a level of self-regulation of their professional conduct, speech, expressions, and actions. As I show, women who deviate from accepted forms of masculinity experience discriminatory and exclusionary practices that provoke a level of simultaneous censure and attraction [13] This article advances work previously undertaken by Morley [14], Sinclair [15], and Mavin and Grandy [16] that explored links between leadership as a masculine construct and the disciplining of women’s bodies, appearance, and behaviours. I adopt two particular metaphors, ‘looking good’ and ‘being good’, to untangle the complexities and ambiguities of women’s leadership lives and to illustrate how women comply with, negotiate, and reject embodied norms
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