Conclusions and Implications
The growing participation of women in academic leadership has led to new personal and professional challenges for them. Besides other workplace challenges, women leaders encounter sexual harassment at all levels of academic and leadership hierarchies. The hegemonic masculine ideologies in academia such as control, violence, and domination endorse the traditional power of men and legitimize their harassment of women leaders, thereby hindering women’s professional growth. Importantly, the stereotypical discourses about marital status and age do not allow young and unmarried women to occupy positions of power in the dominant patriarchal administrative structure of the academia.
The findings of this empirical investigation provide a useful insight into the harassment experiences of women managers in the universities, in the socio-cultural context of Pakistan. The findings are disturbing, because while the Anti-harassment Act, 2011 is in place in the country to deal with challenges to women at workplace there remain significant problems in its implementation. Universities seem to be committed to the Act in theory, through designing antiharassment policies and committees to deal with such cases. Nevertheless, in practice, the inability of women to report harassment issues due to cultural barriers, stereotypes and repercussion in the form of delayed promotions show the challenges related to the implementation of the laws. In addition, being a developing economy, Pakistan is unlikely to forgo women’s talent from its leadership pool for more equitable development. Therefore, there is a need to devise nonhierarchical, consultative, and gender-sensitive approaches to combat workplace harassment. Women need a secure and harassment-free workplace to pursue their leadership careers.
The findings of this study may be helpful for all the stakeholders in developing supportive mechanisms in universities to control intimidations and harassment against women. This may also increase women’s representation at top leadership positions. As this study is limited to the coeducational universities of the general category in two cities of Pakistan, future researches could be conducted in other geographical locations and universities to build comparative insights into such issues. This will also test the implementation of the Anti-harassment Act in practice. In addition, demographic factors such as age and marital status influence women’s exposure toward harassment in academic leadership. Other studies may investigate the impact of such variables as age and marital status at various hierarchical levels in academia.
Acknowledgments: We would like to thank all the academics who participated in this research and shared their experiences openly.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Theoretical Framework
- Literature Review
- Methodology
- Key Findings
- Discussion
- Conclusions and Implications
- References