Gender Equality: Transforming Leadership

This collaborative project crosses three continents – Europe, Africa and Asia – to explore the barriers and enablers of women’s leadership in politics, education, and industry. It aims to understand why the 1979 United Nations Convention promoting the advancement and empowerment of women has consistently failed to meet its objectives, and what practical action is needed now to tackle deep-seated inequalities and breach the high glass ceilings that still exist in senior leadership.  

Kindly supported by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Collaborative Grant, and GENDER.ED at the University of Edinburgh.

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Article 3 of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) exhorts State Parties to take ‘all appropriate measures… to ensure the full development and advancement of women’. In the period since the convention was published, there have been three UN World Conferences on the Status of Women dedicated to the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women, the last of these in Beijing in 1995. Despite this activity, the 64^th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women concluded that, although some progress had been made, there was still no country across the globe which had achieved gender equalityⁱ.  

Gender disparities are particularly evident in terms of leadership in politics, education and industry. On average women make up only 26.5% of members of national parliamentsⁱⁱ, 13% of top managers in corporations^iii, and 19% of the presidents of the top 200 universities globally^iv. As the UNESCO (2021) report on women in higher education concludes, inequalities run deep and glass ceilings remain very high. 

This collaborative project aims to explore the barriers to, and enablers of, women’s senior leadership in a comparative context.  Focusing on the fields of politics, education and industry, it will bring together a network of scholars from three institutes of advanced study in Scotland, Ghana and India.  It is based on a twofold premise: that the inclusion of women in leadership positions can best be analysed within a broader context of gender dynamics and social norms; and that global strategic imperatives often fail to take into account the complex structural and cultural barriers that exist at national and local levels, and thereby consistently fail to effect change.   Key objectives are to: 

• Undertake more systematic analysis of the structural, cultural and individual level factors which facilitate or impede women’s leadership across the three countries of interest;
• Drive understanding as to how local contexts and learning from them can inform global strategy, with a specific focus on the lived experience of women leaders;
• Produce a series of outputs which aim to influence global debates and local policy and practice, including the generation of a co-created manifesto for leadership transformation that is sensitive to localised contexts, and an accompanying agenda for future research and evaluation.

To meet these aims/objectives the project will:

• Undertake detailed comparative analysis of available data on educational pathways, involvement of women in senior decision-making roles in local and national governments, and in entrepreneurship;
• Interview senior women leaders from each sector (27 interviews in total) to understand leadership journeys, and garner perspectives on factors which supported or impeded career development;
• Run three network symposia (online) including lectures, in conversation sessions,  and workshops, bringing together academics,  global leaders, national/local politicians and policy-makers, local activists and NGO groups. These will include bespoke sessions for early/mid-career women in academia, politics and industry, exploring collaborative leadership opportunities and ways of building leadership capacity, and sessions for the wider public.