White privilege, Black resilience: Women of color leading the academy

Abstract

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, women are still grappling with white male dominance, abuses of power, and normalized tolerance of racism or discrimination. White male dominance is also prevalent in America’s education ecosystems as women are still underrepresented in academic leadership. Academic leaders who are women of color face a double bind of both gender and racial biases, both systemically and institutionally. The ways in which women of color navigate these institutional leadership pathways, the hurdles they overcome, and microaggressive behaviors they traverse are not extensively articulated in the literature. Using narrative inquiry, this study examined the lived experiences of women of color leading community colleges and revealed how their resilient attitudes, motivations, and intentions toward transforming the community college presidency upstaged the cloak of white privilege in academia. The national resurgence in women’s rights and anti-discrimination dovetails with calls from the American Council on Education and other national organizations to dramatically increase the representation of women (and women of color) as chief executives of universities. With such lofty goals, the findings of this study have implications on recruitment and retention of women of color faculty and administrators and leadership succession planning in higher education.

Female black, indigenous, and students of color demonstrate greater resilience than other students during a global pandemic

“…BIPOC-W are underrepresented in academia, with few BIPOC-W faculty role models in an institutional landscape of white male dominance (Gause, 2021). Microaggressions, limited access to mentorship, overt stereotyping, and covert bias are a few of the ways that white male privilege in academia is manifested (Banks and Dohy, 2019; Burt et al, 2021; Gause, 2021; Johnson-Ahorlu, 2012). Black female leaders in academia are vocal about the marginalization they experienced as students and even more so as leaders (Gause, 2021).…”

Intersectional Invisibility in Women’s Diversity Interventions

“…Indeed, even within the field of social sciences from which these diversity interventions are frequently based on, there are vulnerabilities that racially marginalized women uniquely experience that often remain at the margins. While there have been gains on the basis of gender in academia, less progress seems to have been made on the basis of race ( Bhopal, 2018 , 2020 ; Gause, 2021 ). Foreign women in academia strongly describe being hidden from view in academic studies and from the professional work floor (e.g., Strauβ and Boncori, 2020 ; Muradoglu et al, 2021 ).…”

A systematic review of succession planning in higher education

“…Thus, future research demands would be succession planning in the higher education institutions with equal participation of male and female. Recent studies conducted by Gause (2021), Ahmad et al (2020), and Phillips (2020) specified the strategic importance of succession planning in higher education. Moosa and Coetzee (2020) identified factors that impact female's advancement to leadership positions such as a denial of capabilities, work-life balance demands, lack of acceptance by men, barriers to female's advancement, need for organizational support to advance, and success beliefs.…”