Morley sees this shift as creating a new ‘script of leadership as an all-consuming activity’ (p.124) (see Alvesson, Lee Ashcraft, and Thomas, 2008) accompanied by a dissonance ‘for leaders coalescing or colliding with normative gender performances’ (p.117) through themes of global competition, audit and austerity. The ‘carelessness’ of new managerialism uses gendered divisions of labour to place the moral imperative to care upon women (Guillaume and Pochic, 2009; Lynch et al., 2009; Lynch et al., 2012; O’Brien, 2007; Runte and Mills, 2004), which helps to explain how women can be punished as well as a rewarded through leadership positions in that ‘there is often a morality that captures women; for example, the suggestion that leadership is the turn-taking, sacrifice’ (p.118).
Like Fuller (2013), Morley deploys examples of misrecognition and gender bias ‘in the way in which wider society offers demeaning, confining or inaccurate readings of the value of particular groups or individuals’ (p.123). Her analysis draws on Diana Leonard’s work (1980, 2001) to show how ‘the managerial university had reinforced constructions of masculinity that were unhelpful to feminism…. and how masculine hegemonies exist despite women leaders’ (p.123). She eschews suggestions of the ‘female advantage’ and innately gendered leadership dispositions as such talk ‘essentialises and homogenises male and female characteristics’ (p.124) (See also Billing and Alvesson, 2000; Delphy and Leonard, 1992). Instead, she sees these ‘propositions’ as creating ‘binds for women who do not ‘fit’ the gender script’ (p.124), hence her concern that seeing women and leadership as about motherhood and leadership fails to ‘account for why some women who are single or child-free are also absent from HE leadership… [so ignoring]… differing cultural and social capital relating to social class, age, sexualities, disabilities and ethnicities’ (p.122).
Morley is wary of formal programmes and informal mentoring which may be offered to ‘fix the women’ (Schiebinger, 1999) and operate to continue and reinforce the current situation (Colley, 2001; Devos, 2008; McKeen and Bujaki, 2007). The concept and practice of leadership in its leaderist form and the leaderist turn in educational organizations needs challenging. She calls for the unmasking of these rules of the game and identifying the ‘metaphors of entrapment’ such as ‘glass ceilings’, ‘leaky pipelines’, and ‘victimhood’, as ‘the relentless misrecognition of women’s leadership capacities and suggests the need for an expanded lexicon of leadership with which to move into the university of the future’ (p.116).