ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the leadership negotiations and discourses articulated by women academic leaders by focusing on a particular case of a gender-sensitive university context in Turkey. It investigates how women in academic leadership positions construct, negotiate and reflect on their leadership practices and gender identities in their personal narratives. The study adopts a narrative analytical framework, based on semi-structured interviews with a group of senior academic leaders at a prestigious university in Turkey. The reflections of women as senior administrators revealed that they experience university leadership as a vulnerable, challenging and precarious path. The most salient manifestations of gendered barriers emerged in the form of an excessive amount of emotional labour resulting from role conflicts between family and work and, at times, an unwelcoming circle. Yet, the analysis of personal narratives revealed that women displayed a very high level of meta-awareness of the gendered nature of senior academic leadership and globally valid masculine discourses around leadership. In the small stories unfolding in interactions, the notion of leadership was observed to be formulated as a discursive site where women open up the norms, practices and ideas around leadership for discussion. Storytelling allowed women to subvert the normative leadership discourses by using multiple interactional and discursive strategies.
