Abstract
For those aspiring to enter higher education administration or for those serving on search committees hiring senior leadership, this book provides a treasure of life histories, providing candid and honest accounts of the what it takes to be an effective leader. From the start, Katuna makes her objectives clear: to draw on her rich narratives to challenge gender essentialism and debunk gendered leadership differentiation. Throughout the book, she thoughtfully reminds us the stakes in her project: to create more opportunities for trans, nonbinary, and intersex leadership. Drawing on feminist research methodologies, I believe this work’s greatest contribution is the centering of the 34 narratives. The semistructured qualitative interviews represent the personal narratives of deans, provosts, and presidents from 17 different institutions across several regions of the United States. Although the sample is fairly proportional with respect to gender, it is overwhelmingly white, cisgender, and heterosexual, which Katuna deftly connects to the persistence of the power elite in U.S. institutions of higher education. The book constructs five guiding research questions addressed in this book. For example, how does gender figure into women’s and men’s descriptions of their workplace interactions? What might degendered leadership look like?
The book is organized into five chapters that provide a wealth of quotes from her respondents, as well as engaging in the relevant scholarly literature. Overall, I found this book to be well written, to be clearly organized, posing important research questions, and utilizing appropriate and robust qualitative data to make conclusions. However, I found two limitations of this work: first in regard to the presentation of the data and corresponding interpretations, and second in terms of the author’s conceptual framing of degendering. As I stated earlier, the most significant element of this book is the centrality of the narratives; the respondent’s voices are front and center, especially in chapters two through four. However, there were moments where Katuna’s voice was keenly missing. Narratives can be interpreted in various ways; therefore, I found several moments in reading the rich quotes that I was left seeking Katuna’s interpretations of how she saw these voices as connected to the larger research questions guiding this work.
Katuna’s conceptual framing of degendering leadership throughout this work is no doubt complex. On the one hand, she finds that gender greatly affects career paths and the navigation of the leadership hierarchy, especially in regard to social constructions of gender and power, as well as work and family balance. On the other hand, Katuna persuasively argues that gender matters little or rather not at all in regard to leadership styles and effective leadership. Here seems to be the crux of the author’s conceptual project of degendering leadership; Katuna argues in her conclusion that effective leadership “encompasses understanding the institutional culture, respecting the position, and prioritizing the interests in stakeholders through shared governance and transparent decision-making. These standards are not gendered; they are universal and displace the problematic feminine and masculine leadership divide” (150). Although I no doubt agree that gender essentialists’ notions of leadership are extremely problematic, I wonder whether the project of degendering leadership runs the risk of erasing gender altogether, especially the historical and ongoing contributions of feminist praxis in transforming the academy.
As a feminist sociologist who is personally and professionally invested in creating more equitable academic institutions, I believe the vision of a “gender-free” academy is somewhat problematic. As we know, colorblind ideology has not advanced the project of racial justice and equity, despite its moral and authentic origins; therefore, the goal of degendering higher education perhaps runs a similar risk of proposing a gender-blind or postgender framework for advancing equity. Alternatively, we can challenge gender essentialism in leadership through the assertion of feminist and decolonial praxis. Perhaps the adoption of overtly liberatory frameworks for academic leadership can both acknowledge this historical context and get us closer to transforming higher education.
Regardless of these conceptual and theoretical tensions, I believe in Katuna’s vision for a more inclusive and diverse academic leadership. Overall, this work is an asset to the ongoing scholarship examining gender, work, and organizations and would be an excellent addition to the reading list for graduate seminars or leadership workshops. This book also provides inspiring and rich narratives that could help those seeking administrative careers or for those involved in implicit bias trainings for search committees.