Call to rethink promotion criteria to help women advance

Promotion criteria should be adapted to help more female leaders advance in academia, a conference heard.

Speaking at Times Higher Education’s Impact & Innovation Summit in New Delhi, Catherine Moran, deputy vice-chancellor at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury, argued that traditional promotion pathways were a “challenge” for women in academia, who often fall into “service roles”, leaving them with less time to focus on research.

Similarly, she said, promotions are commonly reliant on student evaluations of teaching, which, research suggests, can be biased against women. A 2022 study at the University of Iceland – located in one of the most gender-equal countries in the world – found that male students tended to rate their female teachers lower in both teaching and course organisation.

The same bias applied to teachers from Indigenous communities, Professor Moran added. 

“You have to improve career progression, because vice-chancellors don’t materialise suddenly out of nowhere,” agreed Colin Riordan, secretary general of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. 

An important part of this, he added, was influencing the governing bodies that appoint university leaders and ensuring they are gender balanced. 

A recent report from Advance HE found that four in 10 governors of UK universities are white, British, able-bodied men and that growth in the representation of women on these boards is slowing. 

“If the appointment panels are made up of the usual suspects, you’re not going to get anywhere with [advancing female leadership],” said Professor Riordan, former vice-chancellor of Cardiff University.

Institutions should also focus on fostering flexible working and supporting women back into the workplace following career breaks, such as maternity leave, he said. 

“Those policies could exist and are either not implemented or they’re lip service,” he added. “So there has to be a real will to make sure that they are actually operating.”

Panellists at the event also spoke about supporting female leaders once they are in the role. 

“If we bring in a female leader and we don’t make them feel like they belong, we are doing much more of a disservice than not bringing them in at all,” said Saonee Sarker, dean of the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

It is “really about a system change as opposed to individual interventions”, added Professor Moran. 

“The leadership needs to have the vision of…what they want,” she said, and then “systems and policies and processes” should reflect that vision. 

“Putting in a policy that doesn’t reflect the leadership desire is just not going to work.”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com