Gender Gap in Higher Education Leadership: Why are There Small Number of Women Leaders in Universities - Essay Example

The British university system selects a vice-chancellor to head the entire community. Since 1997, 85% of VCs are male, and the women VCs were less likely to be on public record with regards to report long-term relationships or to have children than their male counterparts. 96% of men compared to 68% of women report that they are either married and/or living with a partner, and 81% of men compared to 50% of women report having children. Most hold a degree from the sciences background, which is also seen as a male-dominated field since women tend to choose humanity courses.

In addition, leadership positions are traditionally given ‘male’ characterizations, such as with the 1986 study by Kruse and Wintermantel on the semantic connotations of the concepts woman, man, leadership, manager, and businesswoman. The research reveals that man, leadership and manager belonged in one cluster, while businesswoman and woman each remained separate. Females perceived businesswoman as belonging semantically to man, manager, and leadership, however, men saw the term businesswoman as more similar to man than to woman but not as similar to leadership and manager as the female subjects did.

The meaning of the concept woman included attributes such as soft, warm and the like, whereas the concept man included attributes like hard, cold and so on. Given the history of women as only managers of the household, this continues to the belief that they are not major players in the workforce, and so women are rarely considered in the selection for managerial posts.Even with a stable rise of women academics though, they are still greatly underrepresented, and even with successes in the job, they are more likely to not live with a spouse and not have young children.