Interpreting gender equality initiatives: a discourse analytic study in higher education institutions

This thesis examines women’s continued underrepresentation in leadership roles in higher education institutions by exploring leaders’ constructions of gender equality initiatives. The thesis highlights how leaders contribute to the creation and maintenance of existing organizational culture. The study specifically combines critically-oriented approaches to discourse analysis with the identification of dominant interpretative repertoires to theorize the relationship between leaders’ text and talk and women’s underrepresentation. Through 40 in-depth qualitative interviews with leaders and stakeholders, it contributes to existing literature by identifying conflicting accounts of the values that underpin equality initiatives and by identifying how leaders use pre-existing discourses to legitimize unmeritocratic practices. This demonstrates complex connections embedded within gender (in)equality, discourse, and institutional leadership. When taken together, the findings illustrate that participants construct the need for transformative cultural change while resisting initiatives that lead to this change. This is referred to as the intervention paradox. Thus, although a vocal commitment to gender equality is identified, the paradox that underpins this commitment has ideological consequences for how initiatives are presented by leaders and decision makers. The thesis suggests that this paradox contributes to, and is constitutive of, a process of means-ends decoupling, where the means (initiatives) participants promote are disconnected from the ends (goals). This contributes to existing research by demonstrating that leaders and stakeholders mobilize their discourse to construct gender equality initiatives in a way that promotes and legitimizes their effective commitment to change, and adheres to the overall goals of ‘gender equality’ in institutions, while simultaneously employing discursive strategies that work to maintain and (re)produce the existing status quo.