How Job Sharing Can Lead to More Women Achieving Senior Leadership Roles in Higher Education: A UK Study

Emma Watton, Sarah Stables and Steve Kempster
Additional contact information
Emma Watton: Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YX, UK
Sarah Stables: Stables and Co Innovation Limited, Windermere LA23 1HQ, UK
Steve Kempster: Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YX, UK

Social Sciences, 2019, vol. 8, issue 7, 1-18

Abstract: This article explores the opportunity that job sharing offers as a way of encouraging more women into senior management roles in the higher education sector. There is a scarcity of female leadership representation in the higher education context, in particular a lack of female leadership pipeline. The article examines the underlying influences that limit the representation of women in leadership roles. To address these contextual limitations the process of job sharing is offered as a possible solution for harnessing the skills and talents of women in leadership positions in higher education and enabling the development of a leadership pipeline. To illustrate how such job sharing could occur the article provides a detailed vignette of a job share between two senior women leaders within a single UK university context and the positive impact this had on the organisation, the individuals and their leadership development. This article seeks to make a contribution by exploring how leadership job sharing can occur and sets out some recommendations for the adoption, negotiation and establishment of job share structures in the future.

Keywords: job sharing; leadership; women in higher education; co-constructed autoethnography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/7/209/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/7/209/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jscscx:v:8:y:2019:i:7:p:209-:d:245922

Access Statistics for this article

Social Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Yvonne Chu

More articles in Social Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().