This paper focuses on the origination, development and implementation of a women academics’ change agents network in a UK university. Data informing this paper were gathered during a UKRI funded research project: WomenCAN: Breaking Promotion Barriers, Changing University Cultures, and include narrative interviews with 21 women academic leaders in a range of disciplines, and two follow-up participatory workshops with women academics at all career levels from a range of disciplines. Widespread statistical and research evidence indicates that, despite increased diversity in the workplace and greater numbers of women academics in universities, women are still under-represented in leadership roles (Bierema, 2017, p.148), that there is still a gender pay gap, and that women in leadership positions are often marginalised, isolated and experience epistemic injustices (Madsen, 2017). The WomenCAN project focused specifically on how promotions practices and cultures maintain gendered patterns of inequality regarding a ‘women’s leadership gap’, and the practical measures needed to change this. Situated at the theory-praxis interface, and drawing on feminist theories of organizational change within higher education (Acker, 1990), the project generated nuanced, situated insights into how the structure-culture-institutional nexus produced powerful micropolitical effects that disadvantaged women in very specific ways. Building on feminist critiques of how institutions ‘bear responsibility for social justice, equality, solidarity and care for others’ (Benschop, 2021, p.2), the paper discusses how the Women Academics’ Change Agents Network sought to ‘develop alternative value systems’ (Benschop, 2021, p.2) to current hierarchical and individualizing practices, and contested ‘oppressive organization structures that have not worked, are not working, and will not work’ (Bierema, 2017, p.145). Morley and Lund (2021, p.114) argue the need to ‘consider how we “do” gender in the academy.’ Project data indicated that the proposed network should be there ‘to help and guide women’; be a place for ‘sharing the challenges’; and provide ‘a confidential space for women to get advice from other women.’ The two workshops were a clear call to collective action (‘let’s get organised!’) to ‘influence relevant university policy’ on promotions practices, and to improve the ‘visibility of women academics.’ Envisaged as a driver for change, fuelled by women’s collective agency, and embedded within changes to university cultures and structures to ensure its sustainability (Kassotakis, 2017), the WomenCAN network activates feminist praxis (and activism) through the aim to ‘trouble power relations, imagine better worlds and work to achieve them’ (Ferguson, 2017, p.283).

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