Gender, leadership and power : academic insights

The significant question about how gender, leadership and power are interrelated and together influence organization dynamics has remained unanswered despite the quite noteworthy research that has been separately carried out on each of these phenomena in organisational studies. The principal intention of this paper is to establish the extent to which gender and power influence leadership generally and more specifically what bearing they have on the experiences of women in academic leadership positions. ‘Academic’ for the purpose of this research means university women leaders who have come from a teaching-research background. Aspects of leadership for women academic leaders therefore are interpreted through the refractive devices of gender and power.