The future and the female academic leader: advancing student engagement

The ever-changing face of academic leadership demands constant consideration and as such there is clearly much interest within the community at large to examine this most important of academic roles. To be truly effective the academic leader must be a unique animal who goes beyond merely ensuring that departmental budgets are aligned at the end of the fiscal year but use an ever evolving technological environment to lead in all aspects of teaching, research as well as administrative duties in support of their respective department. In this environment leaders not only need to be aware of, but demonstrate proficiency, in the use of MOOCs, cloud based computing and even efficient use of email software (Huang, 2001; Ruby, 2013). Such a task may seem to be quite unnerving to the new entrants to the field—this is especially relevant for the female academic who may not readily adopt such emerging technologies (Venkatesh and Morris, 2000). However, in a sector where almost all new entrants expect to achieve a leadership position at some point it is important to highlight the current orthodoxy with regards to achieving such a position and any possible mediating role that technology may play. Current research endeavors that highlight the moderating effects of gender in achieving leadership positions within academia are discussed here. It is argued that such research takes a limited perspective on both the roles required with academia but also the unique and very important contributions that female leaders can provide to students. Here, it is clear that the unique collegial and social manner of a female style of leadership that is often seen with managers in industry is an ideal trait for leadership within academia especially with regards to the most important aspect of academia, and often the most overlooked, and that is the student (Eagly and Karau, 1991). Student engagement is a key determinant for improving student motivation, how students approach learning and academic success (Lazaros and Davidson, 2013). It is argued here that technology, particularly the use of email, can play an important role in providing students with access to the unique skill set of certain academic leaders. Probably the largest examination of the effects of gender on academic leadership is seen with the recent work by Parker and Welch (2013). Here, an extensive analysis of a large scale dataset was carried out to examine how an individual’s professional network, an individual’s scientific ability or the gender of an individual independently predicted academic leadership at the level of the research center, the level of the university administrator or even at the position of overarching leadership at the level of the specific scientific discipline (Parker and Welch, 2013). This study is indeed a comprehensive analysis and, while not without its limitations, revealed that scientific productivity and reputation predicted leadership roles at the center level but this was moderated by gender. The study also showed a paucity of female academics at the research center and administrative leadership level but found that females held significantly more leadership positions at the wider discipline level. These are the positions that are generally high profile and serve to act as inspirational role models for students who wish to enter that particular field. However, even though Parker and Welch (2013) was clearly an important study they did not fully address what could be considered the most important aspect of academic leadership and that is understanding how interactions between the leaders of academic institutions and the student body can improve the entire learning environment (Smith and Hughey, 2006). Here, it is argued that use of technology can help to ensure that the students fully interact with female leaders within academia and benefit from their style of leadership. There is no doubt that engaging with students at a social level enhances their overall experience during their course of study and even predicts their actual performance on assessments (Tinto, 1975; Kuh, 1993; Koljatic and Kuh, 2001; Smith et al., 2005). Indeed, we have previously found that undergraduate students consider the quality of their engagement with staff to be the single most important factor in driving their engagement with their programme of study (Towl and Senior, 2010). However, while it is abundantly clear that students do want to have more and more immediacy with their teachers it is not clear if they consider teachers who are discipline leaders as more effective in meeting this requirement.