Making a case for equity initiatives : Travelling towards a mirage? gender, leadership and higher education by Tanya Fitzgerald & Jane Wilkinson [book review]

[Book review of: "Travelling towards a mirage? gender, leadership and higher education / by Tanya Fitzgerald & Jane Wilkinson, isbn: 9781921214684, Post Pressed, Mt. Gravatt, Australia, 2010."] Reading this book reminded me of Salman Rushdie’s words upon reading Kipling, who had, said Rushdie, “the power simultaneously to infuriate and to entrance” (Imaginary Homelands, p. 74). Tanya Fitzgerald and Jane Wilkinson offer a feminist reading of the current status of academic women in Australian and New Zealand universities: a view sufficiently grim to require little additional framing or politicising. It is at times the over-egging of the cake that occasionally weakens, rather than enhances, this text, as the authors’ case is made perfectly well without necessary recourse to a feminist paradigm, or peripheral references. As a literary work, this text is parched and frequently over-argued. As a denunciation of the increasingly unbalanced equity of women in the academy, in academic research and in higher education management, it is unforgiving and relentless.