Femina Academica: women 'confessing' leadership in Higher Education

This contribution explores how different policy discourses produce site-specific representations and self-representations of gender and leadership, which may reveal forms of subjectivation as well as spaces of resistance to hegemonic discourses. I will consider two different Higher Education policy systems: the UK system that since the 1980s has undergone rapid and radical changes that introduced market-oriented reforms profoundly influenced by the managerialist discourse in the form of New Public Management; the Italian system that still remains rooted in the bureaucratic and professional discourses despite some timid attempts to import the 'managerial recipes'. This contribution focuses on the construction of gender and leadership in different academic contexts 'mapping' different aspects connected to the gendered self-narration of leadership. For this purpose, nine interviews of women occupying roles as middle managers in one of the largest universities of the South of Italy and in different universities in the UK, are discussed and compared.