Through theoretical understanding and a series of conversations with female Vice-Chancellors in UK universities, this paper highlights the tenuous nature of certain knowledge claims about women, reported throughout the management literature. It further lends support to the assertion that leadership roles held by women are socially constructed rather than intrinsic to the gender. The methodology adopted, a series of semi-structured interviews, has enabled the author to raise issues related to equal opportunities and equality in Higher Education, with regard to leadership and management. Although not statistically documented, the research presents discussions and reflections on themes which are subject to discussion and current debate in educational management and leadership literature. The paper concludes that it is important to discuss further the concept of masculinity and femininity in educational leadership and management, suggesting that femininity is an untapped source of diversity, which should be explored not only by women, but also men in senior management positions within educational organisations.


Introduction

Complexities characterising the discourse on Higher Education leadership as masculine, feminine or androgynous bring out fascinating questions for educational management theory and practice. Examining simultaneously germane issues of performativity, equal opportunities and diversity leads the present discussion to a critical perspective on the ways in which women leaders are represented within HE and how femininity is little considered as an untapped resource of great richness and significance for educational leadership.  

An analysis of the issues related to leadership is facilitated by very briefly exploring theories which underpin educational management. Such theories, having developed within the chronology of the history of educational management, have at certain points ignored issues related to gender which only in more recent times have had coverage in the educational context. Indeed, the questions raised in this essay surrounding the relations between genders and leadership could not have been effectively raised previously. It is only now that we have available a prolific body of literature on masculinity and femininity, loaded with questions which are of wide and common interest that balanced consideration is facilitated. While some of these questions have been forced about by legislation, others are the interests of sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists, to mention just a few.     

In this way, by attempting a critical examination of some of the knowledge claims about femininity and masculinity represented through styles of leadership, issues of oppression become more evident in the current masculinist culture of performativity in Higher Education today, driven by the commercialisation and postmodern diversification of universities and learning. From this emerge suggestions that equal opportunities should not look at representing women and men equally by merely having more women leaders, but by representing through having more diverse leaders, whether male or female, by the reinterpretation of diversity in leadership.

Understanding is developed in light of the author’s experiences in Higher Education as a lecturer in a typically masculine subject area and environment, as well as reflections from short conversations held with women vice-chancellors and senior managers. In exploring the concept of masculinity as a domineering model of leadership, attention is directed to how masculine ideals are upheld through, for example, management practice, public relations activities and policy.   

From this broad debate, conclusions are drawn centring on the suggestion that it may be more fruitful not to reframe masculinity and femininity as separate styles of leadership, but rather to try and see leadership as inclusive of itself.

Educational Leadership

The development of the educational leadership discourse

In a changing educational context and business-like climate of UK HE, educational management has become a point of attention in its own right (Bush, 2003). It has been argued that the worlds of business and education are by no means mutually exclusive and there is certainly nothing new in the suggestion that the world of education is underpinned by business matters (Gunter, 2006a) (Morrison, 1998). To this end, Bush locates the field of educational management chronologically in that of industry and commerce, including the work of Taylor, Fayol and Weber and notes how theory has been developed through the application of industrial models to educational settings (Bush, 2003). It seems inevitable that, at a certain point, we should reflect on the fact that leadership styles identified in Higher Education and much of the theory of more classic management studies, may collide, collude, interpenetrate and reinterpret each other as the distinctions between HE organisation as business or public sector become more blurred.
Buchanan and Huczynski (2004) have traced historical developments in the way that leadership has been viewed and studied within various fields. Many such classical theories have been based upon the structure of organisations as hierarchical, wherein select individuals are granted the responsibilities and authority of leadership. The most controversial and oldest of general leadership theories are those based on the belief that specific personality traits are directly and causally linked to leadership ability (ibid) and the notion that special innate or acquired qualities enable only some gifted people to ascend to leadership roles. In this sense, such ‘trait theories’ are essentially pessimistic and exclusive in precluding some people from the potential to be leaders. As Tomlinson (2004) notes, inability or unwillingness to lead is due to lack of ‘self-knowledge’, ‘authenticity’ or interest as opposed to inefficiencies of character. Lists of leadership qualities nonetheless generally paint a notably masculine picture of the leader as someone who is tough, vigorous, venturesome, driven, confident, tolerant, influential, ambitious, decisive, emotionally stable and fair (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2004) although there is no unified view regarding which traits are most relevant and lists have been criticised for being lengthy, vague, inconsistent and impossibly generic to all settings. While Stogdill (1948) has suggested that certain traits may be linked to success in specific situations, such theories generally ignore the impact of contextual and interpersonal factors in shaping the way people lead and are led.

To escape such problems, attention later shifted from the selection of ‘born leaders’ to the training and development of leadership skills centring on behavioural aspects of a participative, democratic and involving style (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2004). Researchers such as Blake and Mouton (1978) asserted that patterns of behaviour could be grouped and labelled as styles.

As with trait theories, however, style theories of leadership did not pay appropriate attention to the context or setting in which a particular style was used, failing to recognise that a style of leadership that works well with friends may be highly ineffective with a set of strangers in a crisis. From this emerged an understanding that leadership ‘styles’ are closely linked to other people and the working environment.

Commentators turned accordingly to consider the contexts in which leadership is exercised in response to the idea that needs alter when situation changes. While such contingency theories have varied in focus, they have most strongly incorporated the suggestion that everything is determined by context. This inevitably leads to the proposition that different styles of leadership could be suitable for different situations, exerting demand for individuals able to develop flexibility towards their ways of working to suit the situation at hand. Fiedler (Fiedler, 1967) offered theories combining a mix of factors, such as leadership style, the degree to which the situation gives the leader control and influence and the relationship between leader and followers.

In such theories, there is no expectation that leaders should question the goals of their organisation or that they should change the situation beyond adapting their behaviour and values to it (Cheng, 2002). In this sense, the classical theories and formal models that have shaped leadership practice are securely based on rational and positivist notions of order, control and bureaucracy (Cartwright, 2005). They are essentially transactional in being based around a process of influence between leaders and followers. In contingency theories for example, it is not only the environment that influences effective leadership, but also the knowledge and capabilities of the leader and others and each persons’ values, goals and expectations (Ibid).

Transactional and Transformational educational leadership

It is the ability of a leader to encourage his or her followers beyond what they might have thought possible and turn an organisation into something that can “enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things” (Drucker, 1989, p155) that can represent a demarcation between what it is to manage and to lead, or between transactional and transformational leading. While the former can be understood to emphasise getting things done; to exchange rewards for employee performance and effort, the latter act as visionaries, giving a sense of direction and purpose (Gunter, 2006a).

Managerial goals, associated with the transactional have been suggested to arise from necessity rather than desires, whereas leadership goals centre on changing the way people think about what is desirable, possible and necessary (Zaleznik, 1977).

Transactional management thus emphasises the history and culture of the ‘conservative’ and ‘inert’ organisation (Zaleznik, 1977), reducing agency through systematic adaptation to the environment (Gronn, in Gunter, 2006a), whereas transformational leadership looks to possibilities of exercising individual agency and building dialogical relations (Zaleznik, 177); although criticism can also be levelled at the imbalance of causal agency this accords to leaders (Gronn, in Gunter, 2006a) in certain environments.

While leaders can also be managers (Cartwright, 2005), it is fruitful to emphasise the power of effective educational leadership to inspire and reflect the best in society. In this sense, “Leaders are, at least in part, the creations of those whom they lead” (Eaton, 1988 p.78). At the same time though, organisational goals tend to be the current pre-occupations and intentions of the dominant coalition, so that transforming educational leadership is about striving for change in direct collaboration or confrontation with the stakeholders of an organisation; an organisation characterised by conflict and change rather than consensus and stability (Cartwright, 2005) and influenced from without by an increasingly commercialised context. The emphasis then shifts to managing knowledge in terms of engaging directly with everyday experiences and people (Knights & Willmott, 2000) so that a two-way interaction of employees and policy‑makers facilitates the building of trust in the organisation (Bottery, 2005). 

Bush (2003) identifies a distinction in the roots of effective educational leadership within the significance of educational aims (Bush, 2003). This differs from the organisational goals typical to industry, and requires academic leaders to balance the interaction of aims and abstract goals; of corporate success and educational and social responsibilities. The transformational is thus also in preventing educational purpose and values from being subsumed by managerial procedures (ibid).

Debate in how to understand leadership and develop leadership skills is thus clearly grounded nowadays within a wider understanding of organisational, political and educational issues. From an early emphasis on notably masculine traits of leaders, discussion has turned towards more inclusive organisational theories. Parallel to this has emerged a focus towards less rationalistic and domineering styles of leadership towards valuing of leaders able to transform and help enrich the organisation.

Gender representations in educational leadership

Belief  about natural foundations of gender differences in leadership


It has often been implied that we find the natural or biological characteristics of women and men exercised in their leadership. Moreover, leadership styles that are classed as feminine or masculine are mostly attributed to intrinsic factors related to the leader. This can be sex, biological inheritance or natural traits developed throughout the years as peculiar to the particular gender of the leader. The literature is replete with references to how gender differences can influence leadership style. For example, a masculine view of leadership highlights terms of dominance, aggression (Wilson, 1995) and other stereotypical male attributes like an admiration for hierarchy and control, or a predisposition towards better integration within highly regulated and disciplined environments (Bush, 2003). For the latter, a classic example is the military. Instead, the feminine style of leadership that is reported as being a natural development of the sex-role within an organisation, finds scope within beliefs that women leaders are more caring, creative, helping, responsible, inclusive, intuitive, prone to network collaboration and cooperation. Females are also argued to have stronger verbal skills than males by some (Helgesen,1990)(Fisher, 2005) although as Powell (Powell, 1993) confirms, such notions can only be beliefs.

Such beliefs are amplified by arguments about whether feminine characteristics are developed by women from their very early childhood or are ascribable to a natural predisposition of the individual.

The gendering of roles


Some studies have reported on how trait-based beliefs and stereotypical figures about men or women are products of culture or of archetypes maintained due to organisational environments which reinforce individuals in identifying personal traits or characteristics in particular leadership styles. That is, masculinity and femininity have no ahistorical essence, but are the outcomes of socially generated ideas (Whitehead, 2002). They cannot be grasped by hand and exist in a dialogical relationship. 

Some authors who have highlighted particularly feminine characteristics, choose to maintain some distance from the more radical views (Gray, 1989) by proposing that such intrinsic characteristics linked to gender stereotypes are fruit of the popular imagination. Indeed, it becomes evident how difficult it actually is to identify a person entirely with one category. Social pressures exercised internally or externally to the HE organisation, can make the acceptance of androgyny difficult, especially when leaders in prominent positions are requested to play a particular role linked with their gender, in order to be considered more appropriate figures. Generally, management and leadership in education have been roles held mostly by males, with women marginalized to more caring and nurturing roles such as teaching, counselling and supporting students. Such stereotypes have been the product of a rational scientific tradition of which unfortunately, we still see residual representations nowadays. The male stereotype for such organisations is an individual who is rational, cold, able to manage finances and not in any respect emotionally involved, seeking an objective stance which has the ultimate aim of creating benefits for the organisation through rational means.

Whereas women have been associated with nature, men are allied with culture embedded with enlightenment thought and thus able to control the material world. Particular regimes of truth, in which rationality is associated with masculinity in leadership and emotionality with teaching and femininity, are thus borne out. These hegemonic regimes of truth can survive within particular organisational cultures, as history reminds us how institutions and organisations are socially constructed and not given.

The bureaucrat-neutral figure of the male has found fertile ground in the ideas of Enlightened Circles who have sought to demonstrate the capacity of man to control his environment and nature through science. As such, rationality has also meant being methodical, scientific and objective (Rorty, 1991). Finance and, more generally, administrative roles of education assigned to leaders, become, as such, matter-of-fact where to be rational is to have the criteria for success laid down in advance in order to control and predict. This has nothing to do with the softer side of humans, which is the emotionally-charged, intuitive and subjective view of rationality. It is plausible at this point that masculinity finds in the natural sciences, rational arguments for the existence of natural traits in male leaders, especially if  “…to be rational means to be able to lay down criteria in advance…” (ibid, p.36).                 

In all this theorising, femininity associated with the soft and masculinity with the hard, become regimes of truth. In this women can administer the feminine by only teaching to young children and girls or by leading only women and men can administer the masculine through the dispensation of rational thought in the bureaucratic patriarchal family-like organisation. These accounts are very close to what Cartwright identifies as “the plethora of theories that emphasise the importance of the personal characteristics of the leader…[which]…make them fundamentally different from the rest of the population” (Cartwright, 2005, p.258).

Such masculine hegemonic discourses have nonetheless been countered by feminist accounts of leadership (Blackmore, 1999) which have sought to make the administration of education more inclusive by marginalizing all the facets of leadership associated with biological femininity and instead bringing to the fore, the cultural, ethnic and political aspects of leadership held by women and reframing discourses of femininity within cultural-contextual, historical-structural and social relations.

Masculinity in the workplace has also been the subject of numerous studies which have highlighted how some organisational substrates can be organised around characteristics stereotypically assigned to genders (Maier, 1999). It can become hidden deeply in the process and the whole life of the organisation, as (Middlehurst, 1997) has expounded in his review on leadership theories and gender characteristics, particularly, in trait, behavioural, contingency and power and influence theories.

Conversations with female senior managers in Higher Education

Methodology


A series of conversations in the form of semi-structured interviews have been carried out with three women in executive positions (Vice-Chancellors) and three women in senior management positions in UK Universities. The questions posed to the interviewees by the author, ranged from closed to open-ended, in order to give the respondents the possibility of reflection and to stimulate dialogue. The question themes varied from questions related to personal experiences of the interviewees whilst ascending to their current position as women in leadership management roles, to themes connected to issues of power and gender in the institutions they currently lead.  

The conversations had a duration of approximately one hour and were annotated by the author. Subsequently reflections in light of theoretical understanding have been developed and integrated within the following discussion, in light of the current debate and on leadership and management in educational institutions.

For the purpose of this research, the interviewees have preferred to remain anonymous and no direct quotes from the conversations held are reported below, although the emerging themes and issues are reported in the following paragraphs, which summarise the conversations with the three Vice-Chancellors.

Interview 1


This Vice-Chancellor spoke of a fundamental difference between men and women, suggesting that leaders share a set of intrinsic qualities including vision, the ability to attract admiration and being in some way differentiated from others. She valued most highly the skill of communication for a leader and spoke of herself in terms of typically feminine qualities of inclusion, openness, communication and patience. She nonetheless also emphasised the value of proactivity, persistence and consistency, seeing also some value in autocracy under certain crisis situations while noting the incompatibility of true democracy and leadership.

Her background in industry has taught her that industry is less able to tolerate free thinkers than academia and shown to her the importance of recognising the personal motivation of employees when leading in the academy. This she felt must be reflected in leadership style adopted.

Her being a woman, she felt, had served to distinguish her from male colleagues and brought her some advantage in being highly visible as a woman at her level, though she shared her experiences of being treated differently and ignored by male colleagues in earlier roles.

For this VC, leadership has meant putting faith in her team to develop a concept or project and she speaks gladly of the rewarding feeling in seeing the success of those she has taken a chance and her put trust in.

For her, leadership should represent the beneficiaries Higher Education delivers to HE delivers to and be led by suggestions from the employees, rather than from the peak of the hierarchy.

She expressed the opinion that many women in leadership roles nowadays have adopted a  masculine style of managing and that, while her training and early work experience was in an ‘oriental’, comparably matriarchal and inclusive style, this is in reality compromised by need to have a ‘hard edge’ in order to lead effectively.

Interview 2


This Vice-Chancellor sees herself as being heavily engaged with management of the university.

She suggested that the most important quality of a leader is that of leading the organisation through changes, but that this will not happen by being only a manager; that is, by only balancing the figures. She conceives of herself as akin to a Chief Executie Officer of the organisation, though her leadership role, she maintains does not have intrinsic qualities that are biologically inherited.

For this Vice-Chancellor, her education and experiences have been very important in making the decision to become VC, and that other choices made in her life more generally have contributed to shaping her as a leader.

She feels pleasure at being exposed to a prominent role and believes that, instead of expecting others to carry out a particular task, it is her role to delegate while maintaining contact with things, by devolving control and empowering people. In this she also feels strongly that trust between herself and other people, is the most important secret for getting things done. In this she feels are the most feminine themes of her leadership. In fact, she also feels that involvement in the decision-making process enables her to better connect to her management team. She feels that there are no role models to whom she aspires, but strongly believes that early stages of career have developed her attitude to leadership. She feels also feminist influences exercised in her working practice and her life. Being in a prominent position, she has found herself in front of a management team composed of males who initially did not know how to behave with a woman VC. So, she feels that people behave based on the expectations they have of their own role as gender-related. However, she also feels that there are some masculine themes in her leadership, for example, when she is clear about what she wants to achieve and plans everything at an early stage by making sure that things evolve according to the delegated tasks. In this she wants a degree of control over the situation. With regard to gender-related issues in management and leadership styles, she believes that there is a sort of continuum between men and women and that there is no biological distinction, but that opportunities given to men or women condition their career. The continuum in leadership styles is socially constructed and not biologically inherited, as some of the rational tradition literature instead explicates. She believes that her leadership makes women more visible to management.

Interview 3

This Vice-Chancellor works very closely with the executive team and believes that such team should be more gender-balanced, being composed, at the date of the interview, entirely of men. She feels that the most important quality of a leader is to have a vision leading the institution through and not of managing the actual figures. She refers to a concept described as ‘followership’ as fundamental to the structuring of the organisation wherein her legal responsibilities define her role formally while agency in her way of doing things defines it personally. She emphasises her progression to her present role through the field of education, which she feels to be less gender-biased than other areas she has experienced, such as engineering. The balancing of work and family life are critical for this person, though this is primarily achieved through their separation and careful time management, rather than integration of personal and work aspects of her life. She admits to relying upon the appropriation of ideas and constant interaction with students and staff in her leadership role. Placing heavy emphasis on the fact that the figures must add up in terms of student intake, she was the most managerially-focussed of the women interviewed and highly oriented towards achievement and demonstration of success. She emphasised the importance of personal and professional background in the making of a leader.

Discussion and current debate


The University was once a site of exclusivity and ‘high culture’ (Jacoby, 1997) where the privileged formed a community, almost exclusively of men, to engage in rational discourse and teach, according to Arnold “the best that has to be thought and known in the world” (in Smith and Webster, 1997, p.3). Nowadays things are different. Women heads of Universities in the UK now account for 15 of the total 127 (UK Universities, 2006). There is a better representation of women in lecturing roles, but they are still underrepresented in higher professorial ranks, which remain a predominantly male realm. Universities present many more complexities of purpose and structure. The old unified idea of the University as the home of the educated elite, contrasts particularly with the fragmented and diverse make-up of today’s academies. The process of change has seen UK education pass through a period of bureaucratisation whereby the rational management of knowledge was elevated in relevance (Smith & Webster, 1997). Challenged by the state-imposed paradox of combining cultural and scientific knowledge, in a competitive global economy, the move to mass education is evident today (Scott, 1997).

Indeed, the economy is nowadays a direct determinant of the University’s future development as pressure is on academic leaders, not only to generate cultural capital but also to increase economic wealth. Moreover, in addition to the massive increase in the percentage of people attending Higher Education courses, the diversity of age, sex, nationality and culture has never been so broadly represented in the student community. The strain this puts on resources is a direct indicator of the management approach of university leaders, where instrumentalism presides in the shadow of government stricture (Smith and Webster, 1997).

Today’s Universities, characterised by difference and disagreement between departmental disciplines and values, lack any general motivating theme. In such a liberal setting of mutual disinterest, the managerial figures emerging from the 1992 creation of new universities, may struggle to be visionaries for an increasingly chaotic educational mix. Instead, they can be seen to resort to opportunistic and ultimately passive approaches (ibid) driven by preset agendas, market principles and the need to win resources, rather than wider public interests, participation at all levels and inclusion for students of all outlooks, political and educational backgrounds (Melody, 1997). The emphasis is firmly on performativity and ideas are treated like commodities. Performativity is adopted as a model to bring about material benefits for the organisation, which can be quantified and objectively assessed. Many examples can be seen in advertisements for senior university posts on newspapers nowadays, which clearly show a demand for charismatic, fund-generating managers, able to lead the organisation in the 21st century and relocate it within a competitive market. There is less explicit mention in such job adverts of, for example, the ability to engage with the intellectuality of students and staff, discipline or institution. A new professional identity for senior management is in this way emerging and it is tellingly becoming increasingly difficult to find individuals to fulfil the newly interpreted role of vice-chancellor in a new commercial era for HE (Fazackerley, 2006a). 

Indeed the three female Vice-Chancellors interviewed, spoke consistently of the pressures upon them to perform effectively as leaders in a newly market-focussed Higher Education sector. While each appeared to value their feminine qualities and conceived of themselves as somewhat differential in being women leaders in the sector, they also referred to qualities typically conceived in the literature as more masculine, as being essential if the individual is to be taken seriously by those whom they manage. These include the need to have a ‘hard edge’, taking charge, delegating and, to some extent, exercising power. The pressures on such women seemed to emanate from the need to ‘perform’ in the same way as their male counterparts, a suggestion notable in one interviewee’s admission that male executives were initially confused about how they should behave towards such a figure.

Regardless of the more feminine of the aspirations and beliefs the women interviewed held about their roles, they each identified themselves in their present positions most distinctly as either industry-style executive officers or visionaries constrained by external policy and organisational goals. Such identities fit more closely with the corporate idea of the individual able to make the enterprise perform optimally, rather than the leader inspired to the collective and individual educational values and personal qualities represented within the organisation. The performativity regime emerges from the increasingly corporate-like structure of HE organisations in the UK. It is therefore interesting to explore how masculinist assumptions with regard to leadership as linked to performativity still persist nowadays in universities, although such regime is also extended to other educational institutions and across the public sector (Whitehead, 2005).

Currently in HE, we are assisting in the development of a language that professionals must master in order to succeed and provide a level of accountability to the management. Such language, which includes things like ‘student numbers’, ‘attraction’, ‘income generation’ and ‘third stream activities’ can be found to be inherently masculine. What it proposes is the reaffirmation of masculinity masked under the veil of performance, within a more general performativity regime as a disciplinary system. It is masculine in the sense that it is precisely the masculine corporate culture, with all its characteristics of effectiveness and efficiency gauged in terms of financial gain, rather than employee satisfaction or emotion, inclusion and all the paraphernalia associated with feminine leadership, that enables it to become a perverse tool of oppression. In this sense, in such cultures, women are obliged to change; to mask and suppress, adapting and camouflaging their femininity. They are requested to become masculine women who have learnt “to accommodate to masculine culture, hence they are not anxious to encourage feminine leadership in subordinates” (Tomlinson, 2004, p.147). Work in another sense has been undertaken showing signs of great achievements by women leaders creating positive environments for women (Williams and Swiszczowski, 2005)

Masculinity is in this way reinterpreted in the current managerial climate of HE. More and more often, senior management in UK universities are asked and are required to perform in a truly corporate managerial style (Cartwright, 2005), bringing thus concepts such as managerialism at all levels in the HE sector. Managerialism can also be synonymous with professionalism, a term much used and abused in the current discourse, although retaining some principle characteristics. Such characteristics of professionals can be identified in individuals having strong knowledge and technical expertise (Kerfoot, 2002), who appear to know how to become an individual and at all effects, how to be in the organisation. Professionals nowadays also learn how to relate to others, which inevitably becomes characterised as that act which seeks to render the other subordinate to the demands of the corporation. These become in some organisations, the so-called ‘key people’. This is another form of masculinity, emotionally flat, centred on specialised skills and insistent on professional esteem in light of domination and oppression of other workers in the organisation. In this case, workers can be male or female if they do not adapt to the professional climate. This is very close to all the aspects of leadership and managerialism which cling to performativity in order to find their own being, which becomes better explicated as “the endless search for effectiveness and efficiency in contemporary postmodern society” (Lyotard, in Kerfoot, 2002). Managerial work, as such, projects a heavily masculine imagery. Masculinity simultaneously becomes reinterpreted in the discourse through the activities and behaviour of a professional manager. It is not difficult to notice the marginalisation of feminine traits, as well as the marginalisation and oppression of males displaying a feminine attitude within the new role ascribed by the postmodern society to leaders. It follows that the figure of the professional is at the same time that of manager, who may also be a leader who is already loaded with ideas of success; the language of success must as such be learnt and spoken and the discourse should pervade the formal structures of appraisal, job retention and promotion. Such language pervades the disembodied actions of the competent manager. The power relationships involved in such transactions symbolise the masculinity of the discourse in which lower organisational substrates are requested to participate. Appraisal processes and job performance do not only extend but also amplify the masculinist discourse of the academy by re-establishing the order of superior-subordinate, competent-trainee, senior-junior, which is uncomfortable and in some cases undignified for academic women and men also. The issues of power relationships involved in appraisal processes and job promotions can become seriously imbalanced (Brooks, 1997) to the point that the underlying masculinist agenda behind the transactional natures of such relationships becomes evident. Brooks, in her study (Brooks, 1997) has brought to light how the imbalance at senior levels in the academy between women and men, can enforce masculinist discourses through the power exercised in appraisal processes and job promotion interviews. Senior management, being the setting in which leadership has been traditionally identified (though when understood broadly, leadership can also be seen at various levels throughout the organisation) if gender-imbalanced, can create serious preoccupations with regard to the emergence and consideration of leaderships with underlying feminine styles. It is an error nonetheless to consider women and feminine leaderships as a homogenous category; that would only bring about an idea of complement to masculine styles, more than of diversity and untapped sources to be explored.

Conclusions

This debate raises significant questions, not least that of whether or not it is still feasible or helpful to continue to talk of femininity or masculinity or androgyny in leadership, when seeking to identify characteristics in an increasingly chaotic intellectual culture. Should not perhaps the increasingly chaotic postmodern university environment be a ground in which stereotypical characteristics might lose their patterns?

It is perhaps then most fruitful to view masculinity and femininity both as products of social construction: More fruitful because it can help us to develop a more acute awareness of our own masculinity and femininity. An important underlying consequence of such a venture would be to help ensure that there are no people on this world who can lay claim to prescribed rights to lead, but that they become agents of their own making.

We are then encouraged to raise further questions. For example, are organisations becoming truly inclusive by opening up senior management doors and more generally workplace doors to women, or are they merely responding to legislation without allowing for challenges to what leadership has been and is and thus expecting women at work to perform as masculine? At the same time, what prejudices exist towards men who display feminine characteristics in their leadership approach and how many are excluded from senior management positions for such reasons?

In such a panorama it is important therefore to identify new grounds for the explorations of a new diversity of leadership, gender relations and styles. Thus far, the discourse on masculinity and feminity in educational organisations has been very fruitful in order to engage women in the debate and level some of the difficulties in the discourse surrounding leadership in universities. Leadership and diversity have also been historically argued over and circumscribed within the gender difference speculation of either the analytic-rational or the Marxist-feminist tradition. The equal opportunities legislation has in this respect, not acknowledged diversity in intellectual philosophical terms but has highlighted only the behavioural aspects of. Its preoccupations have been mostly to relocate underrepresented people within organisations, nonetheless treating them as convenient objects with regard to sex, ethnicity, age and identity: Relocating individuals who inevitably become swallowed up in the masculinist and oppressive culture of some universities.

Perhaps until the discourse on educational leadership moves away from calls to reframe masculinity or femininity as a tangible and ahistorcal entity and instead helps encourage the making of leadership as inclusive, it will not be possible to truly transform HE leadership.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Prof. Stephen Whitehead and David Cracknell for their useful comments and suggestions on the early development of this paper.

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