Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Yönetim ve Çalışma (Online), cilt.8, sa.1, ss.1-9, 2024 (Hakemli Dergi)
The purpose of this paper is to explore academic women’s choice towards leadership positions in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) in Turkey. First, the situation of academic women in Turkish universities is examined. Turkey underwent regime change at the end of the twentieth century. Neoliberal reforms followed 1980 Turkish coup d’état. These reforms affected higher education and research, and entailed reduction in public funding for universities, introduction of private universities, massification of higher education, a rise in competitive distribution of research funding, attempts to introduce university tuition fees, introduction of metric-based assessment systems and change in the societal role of universities and research, with universities becoming service providers (Aslan, 2014;İnal & Akkaymak, 2012; Linkova, Atay & Zulu, 2021, 75). With these changes came a stress on research assessment and performance, especially through impact factor publications, lincarisation of the research career, a shift from core institutional funding to projectification through grant funding and introduction of international academic mobility as a sign of excellence. All these factors are gendered in the sense that childbirth and childcare commitments strongly conflict with these new features of academic careers. The new demands related to research careers, family policy predicated on the assumption that women are the primary childcare provider, the lack of childcare facilities for children under three and the continued unequal distribution of childcare and housework between partners all combine to create very different conditions for women’s and men’s career aspirations and choices in academia. In exploring the issue of choice, qualitative data from pre-interviews, interviews and document analysis using the Success Case Method (SCM) (see Yin, 2018) are undertaken in this study. The Case Study University (CSU) is chosen as the research site because it had made great progress in gender equality in education, research and training. The data entails an empirical study of female and male university senior managers. The researcher had to complete her university ethics approval checklist and submit it to the Ethics Advisory Committee. Ethics approval is secured before conducting in-depth interviews with six female and sixteen male senior managers in fundamental and applied sciences as well as social sciences (Rector, five Vice-Rectors, seven Deans and nine Deputy-Deans). The case study university has a supportive organizational climate for its gender equity policy. In order to encourage more women into senior roles, several support programmes to build managerial skills, mentoring and coaching programmes or providing role models, even when an institution implements a gender equality plan can be considered. As a conclusion, major initiatives that affect the gendered culture of the Turkish universities are explained.
Keywords: Academic women, Turkish higher education institutions, Gender equality