While some women are flourishing as leaders in the global academy, many are misrecognised and rejected. It is a two-way gaze, however, with women in diverse geopolitical spaces subjecting leadership to critical scrutiny and rejecting it as an unattractive career option. Key considerations are what and how are we asking women to lead? Leadership can be perceived as the implementation of an assemblage of globally circulating neoliberal policy measures and cultural regimes that privilege performance, price and profit. This reading positions leadership as a pre-determined script and compliance with a political economy that conflicts with feminist value systems and epistemologies. Furthermore, archaic associations of leadership with particular types of masculinities mean that establishing leadership authority when it does not readily ‘stick’ to women involves an affective load for those women who disrupt the symbolic gender order of women being led by men. There have been numerous studies on gender inequalities in higher education, and restrictive gender binary categories have been problematised, but little attention has been paid to what might constitute a gender-free university. This paper draws on data from two research projects: Morley and Crossouard’s (2016) British Council commissioned research on women and senior leadership positions in higher education in South Asia, and Lund and Morley’s Finnish research Imagining Leadership for a Gender-Free University. The South Asian project included 30 semi-structured interviews with academics (19 women and 11 men) Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. A major finding was that women are being rejected or disqualified from senior leadership through discriminatory recruitment, selection and promotion procedures, gendered career pathways and exclusionary networks and practices in women-unfriendly institutions. However, women were also refusing, resisting or dismissing senior leadership and making strategic decisions not to apply for positions which they evaluated as onerous and undesirable. The findings led to designing a project in one of the ‘promised lands’ for gender equality- Finland - and we conducted 10 interviews with women heads of departments about their aspirations and perceptions of senior leadership. Theoretically, both projects engage with feminist affect theory (Ahmed, 2010), and neoliberalism in the prestige economy of the global academy (Lund, 2018; Morley, 2018). We conclude that rather than focusing on counting more women into existing highly masculinised and patriarchal systems and structures, there is an urgent need to fashion a new political imaginary and re-vision leadership to create and sustain gender-free universities.

Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. London: Duke University Press. Lund, R. (2018) The social organisation of boasting in the neoliberal university, Gender and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2018.1482412 Morley, L. and Crossouard, B. (2016). Gender in the Neoliberalised Global Academy: The Affective Economy of Women and Leadership in South Asia. British Journal of Sociology of Education 37(1): 149-168. Morley, L. (2018) Gender in the Neoliberal Research Economy: An Enervating and Exclusionary Entanglement? In, Kahlert. H. (Ed.) Gender Studies and the New Academic Governance. Global Challenges, Glocal Dynamics, and Local Impacts. Wiesbaden: Springer VS (pp. 15-40).