Women in leadership

1. Participation in the Aurora women only leadership programme is underway (more below).
2. Women in Leadership event – Celebrating the impact of visible role models (more below).
3. And in case you missed it, Equal Pay Day was on 10th November:

With a gender pay gap at 14.1% in the UK, women are working for the rest of 2017 for free. Find out what UEL is doing about addressing the equal pay gap. Our Athena SWAN application also identified priorities to work towards.

1. Aurora is a women only leadership development programme run by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (LFHE) and developed in response to feedback that showed a decline in women in HE leadership. The programme aims to enable a wider range of women to think of themselves as future leaders and to acquire the skills they need. In reframing the new Research and Knowledge Exchange (RKE) budgets, funding has been ring-fenced specifically for female leadership development through the LFHE Aurora scheme for women at UEL. We currently have six participants in the Autumn cohort and a further five will join the Spring cohort.

There are skeptics of women only development or leadership programmes as being a deficit model. However, the Aurora programme has been developed based on extensive research in to leadership development which aims to revise traditional approaches to leadership development using a gender lens through reference to women’s experiences and recognising cultural barriers and gender dynamics at play within organisations. Participation in the Aurora programme forms part of a broader action plan which aims to tackle cultural barriers to gender equality.

These are a couple of references which may be of interest from the Power and Politics session on taking gender into account (Ely, Ibarra and Kolb 2011) and exploring micropolitics in HE (Lumby 2015) . Another model on understanding people’s different motivational emphasis is interesting for example when considering behaviour in meetings:  

UEL’s Aurora participants will be running action learning sets once they have completed the programme so watch out for these.

2. The first in a series of leadership symposiums was on the theme of Celebrating the impact of visible role models (Women in Leadership event 8th November 2017) and a great success. You can watch the event on youtube!