Bridging The Gender Gap In University Leadership And Management: Experiences Of Zambian Women Professors

This dissertation presents the narrative inquiry study that was undertaken to explore the lived experiences of Zambian women professors in the highly gendered structural and power systems and cultures of universities where they attained academic and administrative leadership.Specifically, the study sought to interpret the women’s lived experiences and identities. The study was framed within the broader feminist perspective, taking a narrower angle through the intersectionality approach in establishing how the women created and utilized spaces to attain professorship and senior managerial ranks. The central theme is an exploration and understanding of how the women professors managed against all odds to ‘bridge the gender gap’ that is so eminent in senior most positions in the academe. The women’s experiences under gender performance were events or situations that advanced attainment of senior academic and administrative positions within traditionally inhibitive patriarchal university cultures that are commonly exclusive to men. As a qualitative narrative inquiry, the study audio-recorded, transcribed and thematically analyzed ‘conversational’ interviews of some senior women academic.The study focused on eight women professors working or having worked at any of Zambia’s public universities. The women were purposively and conveniently selected and in July, 2014 participated in a research study about their life experiences, factors at work and outside of work with regards to their career trajectories in achieving academic and administrative leadership seniority. The ‘bridging of the gender gap in university leadership and management’ is based on these women’s lived accounts. Through in-depth, ‘conversational’ interviews, the study listens to the women’s narratives of their lives in terms of leadership and management rise, looking for significant experiences that mattered most in enhancing or inhibiting their advancement and the role of self and others in their career-making and attainment that accessed them to the ‘other side’. The dissertation highlights some of the most common explanations for persistent gender imbalances and shows how they are based on common stereotypes and myths about men’s and women’s abilities and preferences.The study critically demonstrates intersectionalities of identities and factors at the personal, professional and organizational levels revealing commonalities among the participants that are tied to the women’s self-confidence, determination, faith, familial support and education. The women performed, challenged and defied gender permutations through self-and gender norms reinvention to create spaces for their achievements.The dissertation uses the narrative research method, employing feminist perspectives and the ‘Three Domains factors model’ to deeply discuss the eight female professors’ professional growth and experience of the top leadership and management layer of Zambian universities. It builds from the gendered nature of universities arising from the traditional socio-culture and its offshoots that the female professors face in the academic development and administrative leadership qualifications. In a positive narrative, the study focuses on how the women professors have defied the odds of gendered socio-cultural and institutional environment to succeed in ‘becoming’ academic leaders and institutional managers. The study highlights the defining important influence of the female professor’s education, self-confidence, determination, faith, familial support, and other factors in their access to the position of leadership and management in university. The dissertation studied in depth the strategies such as the individual’s faith in self agency, the role of family and mentors in ensuring a solid educational base for attainment of higher formal qualifications which are essential in creating room for career and professional advancement. Furthermore, the study demonstrates how the women’s self assertiveness and re-engineering are critical to effectively dealing with the multiple, often overlapping, identities they possessed in the workplace and communities. These identities were constructed from the traditional gender expectations imposed by the society; however, the women’s narratives demonstrate conscious defiance of these societal constructs and expectations.Furthermore, the research work provides a way of understanding some of the issues about gender and how they especially affect women representation in senior leadership and managerial roles in universities in Zambia. The study moreover holds that the women’s experiences herein present differently, positively to the common narratives on assumptions and explanations for the underrepresentation of women in senior ranks which is mostly negative. Through personal agency of self-confidence, determination, faith and family and education the women created a threshold for career and professional advancement in the highly gendered academic institutions. As such, these principles would guide especially individual decisions, action, and behavior that lead to high academic attainment and also an increase in the number of women in high ranking positions in academia.And the important conclusion from Zambia’s existing eight female professors with leadership and management experience is that creativity is central in performing and re-inventing prevailing gender norms. The development and successful attainment of high status careers and management ranks by women has important significance to the diversity and effective leadership of academe in Zambia especially in the 21 st century.