Breaking Glass Ceilings

: Assessing Barriers and Opportunities of Initiatives Designed to Advance Women into Senior Leadership in UK Higher Education

Abstract

Higher education institutions in the UK face challenges in addressing the gender leadership gap, with identified barriers such as caring responsibilities, work-related challenges, culture, and infrastructure. To address these issues, universities have implemented initiatives such as women only leadership development programmes, networks, coaching and mentoring, and organisational commitments such as equality, diversity, and inclusion policies and institutional charters. The term allyship is a newer emerging approach and is also being explored to support women aspiring to progress into leadership. This research study aims to critically evaluate the effectiveness of such initiatives, within a UK higher education institution.The research adopts a qualitative multi methods approach, including an online survey completed by 173 women in the institution and 12 semi-structured interviews with men and women in the institution already defined as senior leaders. Findings highlight the effects of engagement in leadership and development initiatives, such as increased confidence and self-development, however, suggest that they often do not directly lead to more women in leadership positions due to lack of alignment to career opportunity or due to work-related and infrastructural barriers. Organisational commitments, such as policies and charters, are found to be useful in providing a framework for action plans, but they do not directly enable more women to progress due to complex structural and cultural barriers, resulting in disengagement from such initiatives by the women they aim to positively affect. Allyship, a newer concept, is discussed in two parts: formal allyship, which includes mentoring and coaching, and informal allyship, which raises awareness of gender inequality, calls out discriminative behaviour, and provides advocacy for women. The study proposes a number of recommendations including looking beyond the sector for best practice, incorporating accountability for change, impact assessing current policies, and conducting ongoing evaluation. The study also demonstrates that allyship shows potential to be a positive way forward in supporting more women into leadership roles, with the right understanding of the concept, training and support from senior leaders.

Date of Award	Aug 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Coventry University
Supervisor	Maktoba Omar (Supervisor)