Higher education institutions should implement policy to support women running for academic office, researchers have advised, after a to put themselves forward for elected leadership positions.
Czech?academics Karel Kouba, of Charles University, and Pavla Do?ekalová, of the University of Hradec Králové, analysed data from university senate elections at public institutions in Czechia, spanning 142 faculties and almost a thousand candidates.
“The gender representation in academic leadership and governance is notoriously uneven,” Kouba told Times Higher Education, adding, “The Czech situation borders on the extreme.”
According to the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Centre for Gender and Science, women made up about 37 per cent of academic staff at higher education institutions in 2022, while only 14 per cent of institutional leaders were women. In “decision-making, strategic and supervisory bodies”, 23 per cent of members were women, while that figure rose slightly to 26 per cent in advisory bodies.
Campus resources on equity, diversity and inclusion in higher education
Would-be female leaders were “not disadvantaged by [the] process itself” but reluctant to put themselves forward, according to researchers.
Kouba and Do?ekalová opted to study elected leadership positions because of their significant role in Czech academia, Kouba said. “The Czech system of academic governance is unique in that it is based on a strong university autonomy which is expressed most importantly by powerful [elected] academic senates,” he explained. “Unlike many other academic systems around the world, elections play a much more important role in generating academic leadership.”
After their statistical analysis of the election data, the researchers determined that women were not disadvantaged “by the electoral process itself” – in other words, Kouba said, “once women run, they are?equally likely to be elected”. The conclusion was “surprising”, he commented, “given common assumptions about voter bias or gender stereotypes”.
The authors therefore concluded that the barrier to women’s participation in elected leadership roles “lies earlier, in women’s decisions not to run”, Kouba said.
Among the major factors likely to discourage women from running are “male-dominated academic environments”, a lack of role models and an incumbency advantage, Kouba said, although he stressed that further qualitative research is needed to examine these motivations.
Incumbents tend to be “disproportionately men”, Kouba explained, while women are less likely to pursue multiple terms. “As incumbents are massively more likely to get elected, relative to first-time candidates, this cements the gender gap.”
To boost the representation of women, universities “should focus on motivating and supporting women to run for leadership positions”, he advised, while term limits for senators could help to tackle the incumbency advantage that typically favours men. Increasing the proportion of women in other leadership roles, meanwhile, could provide important role models for potential candidates.
“Universities should also work harder to acknowledge the work by academic senators in career evaluations and their overall workload, as senatorial work is often unpaid work performed during ‘free’ time,” the study authors stressed.
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