Being there- a qualitative arts-based narrative inquiry into the lived experiences of women in management and leadership in high education in Ireland

Abstract

The story of a male dominated leadership environment in academia is one which has been well told both nationally and internationally, as has the description of the academy as one in which the devaluing of women has become socially normalised. There is also the underlying problem of the gendered organisation, whereby work practices and embedded attitudes to male and female stereotyped roles have evolved from the life experience of the traditional male wage earner such that the image of leadership is still “resolutely masculine” (Fitzgerald, 2016, p. 209). The under-representation and marginalisation of women has been further exacerbated by the rise in the culture of new managerialism in the HE sector. This study adds to the growing literature on the career experiences of women in academia internationally and looks beneath the surface of this grand narrative of underrepresentation of women in Higher Educational management and leadership, exploring the ‘understory’ of what is it is like for women simply ‘being there’.

The researcher has undertaken a literary arts-based narrative inquiry which set out to co-construct stories of lived experience with women who have held or continue to hold leadership positions in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Ireland. Their stories helped the researcher make sense of her own experiences as a Head of Department in HE, and as co-participants we have shared our stories as women simply ‘being there’ in the role. The research design of this narrative inquiry is underpinned by the adoption of a constructivist, interpretivist stance and the participant narratives are viewed through a post-structural critical feminist lens to examine the gendered experiences of women operating in a predominantly male environment. Poststructuralism seeks to unpack and break down accepted knowledges to shed new light and produce new insight, the kind of insight that stories of personal and lived experience can bring to the wider discourse on gender inequality.

The story threads in the participant narratives have been unravelled and woven together again into a patchwork quilt of lived experience and ‘re’-told as poetic monologues, creative non-fiction stories, culminating in one coherent telling in the form of an ethnographic playscript or ethnodrama. Ethnodrama can be viewed as a means of giving the participant narratives an “aesthetic shape and magnitude” (Saldana, 2010, p. 68) which adds to their value and could lead to a more meaningful and wider engagement with the research material. Immersed in a research paradigm which eschews singularity, this literary arts-based narrative inquiry offers an interpretation of the stories of lived experiences that I have been privileged to hear, but it is only one interpretation and as Clandinin (2018) concludes, it could always have been otherwise.

As such, emerging out of ‘small stories’ of personal and lived experience, I offer a story of women who aspire(d) to achieve in roles that were not written for them; who resist where possible the demands of hegemonical male power structures that are endemic in management and leadership in HE in Ireland in an effort to retain their status as both women and managers and more often than not, carers; and who are expected to perform their gender and act as the ‘one caring’ to carry out the organisational ‘housework’ and interpersonal management tasks through the gendered expectation of an ethic of care and connectedness; and the achievement of all of the above at a sometimes heavy personal cost.