Accessibility Tools
For Snježana Prijić-Samaržija, global crises, algorithmic biases and anti-gender backlash are ushering in a period of regression in tackling inequality, but initiatives like EUA’s Leadership Development Programme show just how essential gender mainstreaming is to the resilience of higher education and research.
The present era of continuous social crises and emergencies has affected processes of institutional and cultural change at universities. It has also influenced gender relations, which are now being reconfigured and frequently undermined.
Despite different contexts across Europe, strategic policies related to gender equality continue to face dilemmas and resistance. This requires awareness and understanding, as well as timely solutions.
Contemporary complexities, such as the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, continued geopolitical tensions, digital transitions and nascent narratives hostile to questions of gender have shifted our focus from long-standing efforts to tackle female representation in top leadership positions, the remaining pay gap and work-life balance. For universities, gender mainstreaming is now approached in terms of institutional vulnerability, preparedness and resilience and broader democratic legitimacy.
Transformative efforts on gender mainstreaming require education and systematic empowerment.
Like all other institutions, universities reproduce entrenched social norms, harmful stereotypes, power hierarchies and informal practices that favour particular career trajectories and approaches to leadership. For instance, the established academic criteria that foreground ‘excellence’ incentivize continuous productivity without interruptions and rely on informal power hierarchies. They therefore often underestimate the impact of patriarchal pigeonholes and prejudices that reaffirm the status quo in allocating gender roles.
These structures become particularly challenging in times of heightened insecurity, vulnerability and risk, when institutions tend to accelerate decision-making and centralize power. Uncertainties thus operate as a ‘stress test’ of existing gender roles within institutions.
In particular, three threats to gender mainstreaming at universities have emerged as direct consequences of worsened social uncertainties.
First, nobody should be surprised by numerous sources reporting that women are – despite official equality policies – still underrepresented in academic leadership positions in Europe and beyond.
However, it may not be equally recognized that this initial structural imbalance becomes a locus of institutional vulnerability in nascent crises. For instance, studies of the Covid-19 pandemic have shown that it had negatively impacted the research productivity of women in academia, overburdened them with unpaid labour and domestic care and further diminished their representation in crisis management.
The risk of universities failing to adjust to moments of social instability disproportionately increases for women, who are still subject to traditional and stereotypical gender roles. This ‘rollback effect’ demonstrates that attained levels of equality within an institution do not automatically guarantee its resilience to structural disruptions. Considering our recent experience with pandemic management, today’s increasing geopolitical tensions and global uncertainty will likely generate comparable outcomes.
This context of uncertainty amplifies the proclivity to ‘solidify’ present conditions and oppose change processes or institutional transformations. It also renders institutions more pliant to supposedly more ‘rational’ rather than ‘relational’ approaches. Institutions then also lean towards the familiarity of traditional leadership modes, which prioritize authoritarian, centralized and highly hierarchical solutions that are conceptually associated with ‘masculine’ leadership.
The second challenge stems from the digital transformation of higher education, including data management, the strategic usage of digital media and the implementation of artificial intelligence.
Since STEM research areas have remained segregated by gender and primarily male, decisions about digital infrastructure and instigating AI systems are delegated to male-dominated bodies, which further affects the structure of academic leadership.
The adversities built into this transition are apparent in the increased usage of algorithms in evaluation, recruitment and the allocation of resources. This has been shown to reproduce historical gender inequalities due to exposure to gender-blind or even biased data. If academic leadership on gender inequality is insufficient, such biases become normalized under the guise of technological neutrality.
Finally, the third challenge comes from burgeoning anti-gender movements, extremist male narratives and institutional pressures that frame gender mainstreaming as a political initiative.
In certain countries, gender equality and gender studies have been co-opted by ideological disputes that have infringed upon academic freedoms. Such developments entail broader consequences, such as the suppression of gender policies and diminished institutional support for programmes that promote equality.
Moreover, online discourse has enabled the rapid proliferation of narratives on the ‘crisis of masculinity’ and alleged institutional discrimination against men, which is entirely groundless in present statistics. In higher education, these narratives undermine the legitimacy of affirmative action, compound the incidence of online harassment and create a highly politicized institutional environment. These and related practices displace gender equality from management policies and position it as an escalating culture war.
In the context of European higher education, the fact that gender equality plans were required as a precondition for partaking in the Horizon Europe programme was a substantial step forward towards transformative gender mainstreaming. However, growing institutional vulnerability threatens to confine this significant institutional momentum to the level of formal commitments or symbolic inclusions of women devoid of authentic progress.
The reality of a certain institutional weariness – otherwise known as ‘diversity fatigue’ – is yet another aggravating factor that undermines trust in the value of equality in the long term.
Following decades of continued – although perhaps insufficiently swift – progress towards gender equality at universities and across broader society, we have now entered a period of stagnation and regression.
In its authentic commitment to representation and female leadership, the European University Association’s Leadership Development Programme, an invaluable tool for training future leaders, recognizes that gender equality is a question of representation and fairness, just as much as it is a question of excellence in leadership and democratic legitimacy.
The LDP takes an authentically gender-sensitive and value-based approach that builds on EUA’s uniquely participative and project-based knowledge. Its principles of female representation in leadership training and exchanges of diverse experiences or perspectives on leadership signal a profoundly democratic alternative to frequent regressions towards traditional leadership models. Crucially, the programme is based on the assertion that the future of excellent academic leadership and the implementation of transformative gender mainstreaming are mutually interwoven.
