65
studies have, so far, documented this. Greyvenstein (1989) discusses
impediments facing
women in educational management and what can be done to overcome these. She
investigates this problem from the perspective of women principals in the UK, South
Africa and the United States of America. Petersen and Gravett (2000) report on the
experiences of women academics at one South African university.
The current state of higher education
transformation; the institutional mergers and the
additional demands placed upon institutional leadership and management make it
necessary to explore the factors that may explain the slow advancement of academic
women’s careers in higher education – particularly academic women middle-managers.
It is established that women are grossly under-represented in senior positions at
universities and continue to be under-represented even in the wake of equal opportunity
policies such as ‘employment equity’ in South Africa and equal employment
opportunities and equal pay act in the UK. In South Africa, concern regarding the under-
representation of women in top positions in academe is
expressed in a proposal to the
Council on Higher Education (CHET)
concerning activities supporting the development
of
women in higher education. The proposal calls for an increase in the number of
women in senior and/or decision-making positions in academic and professional life. In
the UK some committees and commissions have been established to look into the
problem of the tardy advancement of women and to remove existing barriers. For
example, the Hansard society established a commission in 1989 which in turn launched
Opportunity 2000 (Hansard Report 1990); the CVCP published guidelines
on equal
opportunities in employment and established a Commission on University Career
Opportunity (Brown1997:109). Meyerson and Fletcher(2003) explain that inequity is
rooted in the entrenched male definition of organisational leadership. In their view:
The barriers to women’s advancement in organisations today have a relatively
straightforward cause. Most organisations have been created by and
for men and are
based on male experiences. Even though women have entered the workforce in droves
in the past generation, and it is generally agreed that they add enormous value,
organisational definitions of competence and leadership are
still predicated on traits
stereotypically associated with men: tough, aggressive, decisive. And even though
66
many households today have working fathers and mothers, most organisations act as if
the historical division of household labour still holds – with women primarily
responsible for matters of the hearth. Outdated or not,
those realities drive
organisational life (p232).
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: