ABSTRACT
There are few women in senior management in the university I work for in South Africa. I have watched senior women colleagues opt out, one after the other. I am also often blamed for this state of affairs. With past success in senior management in the Information Technology sector, I thought I could change things. I thought I could show the university how to manage in a humane manner, which engaged the heart, which made sense. But I failed. After two years heading a large school, when colleagues were expecting me to stay and consolidate the changes I had made, I stepped down. Within months, the changes I had made were dismantled. The elastic snapped back into place. My memoir draws on institutional theory to understand the persistence of perplexing practices that drive women (and many men) to sanely seek meaning and satisfaction in lower status positions. It is also a manifesto for new institutions, designed from the bottom up to support a better-aligned set of values.
