Women in UK higher education are underrepresented in academic and managerial roles, particularly in science, engineering, and business schools. Despite being the majority in staff numbers, they face biased evaluations, impacting their career progression, especially in research and publishing. Initiatives like the Athena SWAN Charter aim to address gender inequality, but progress remains slow. Business and management schools, in particular, show significant gender and racial imbalances, with women underrepresented at senior levels. Structural and cultural barriers, including sexism and a lack of clear promotion criteria, continue to hinder gender equality. Immediate action is required to address these systemic issues, and this article proposes solutions and ideas on how to move things forward.

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Introduction: The Gender Problem

Although women make up the majority of all staff working in UK higher education (Advance HE, 2023), they remain under-represented among academic positions in science, engineering and technology subjects as well as in managerial roles. They are over-represented in administrative and support roles (Advance HE, 2023).

Whilst universities consider themselves meritocratic systems, critics have challenged the degree of meritocracy in academic evaluations. If universities were meritocratic then academics should be judged on merit alone, while social categories such as gender should be irrelevant. Research has shown that this is not the case – biased evaluations and decision-making are still pervasive in academia and contribute to women’s disadvantaged positions (Trevino et al., 2018; van den Brink and Benschop, 2011). Weisshaar (2017) found that performance differences between men and women could only partially explain the existing gender gap in promotions to tenure and full professorships. Biased tenure evaluations were main contributors to women’s under-representation on tenure tracks and in professorship positions. Van den Brink and Benschop (2011) have argued that biases such as same sex favouritism and the ‘similar to me’ effect displayed by male gatekeepers contribute to these inequalities in evaluation.

Evidence from UK Research Reports and Initiatives

In 2004, the UK introduced a national system, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), to measure and compare the quality of research outputs from universities. The REF outcomes decide the distribution of funding for research across UK universities. REF’s claim to promote ‘equality and diversity’ attempts to address research on academic publishing that suggests a gender gap connected to a lack of objective peer review processes. Lundine and colleagues (2018) noted that the “gendered system of academic publishing is both a reflection and a cause of women’s disadvantaged positions in academia.” Relative to their representation, women publish significantly less than their male colleagues (West et al., 2013; van den Besselaar and Sandstroem, 2017).

It has been debated as to whether the journals are to blame for this gender gap, with some accusing them of discrimination against female authors (e.g., Helmer et al., 2017: Lerback and Hanson, 2017), and others refuting this idea by citing lower submission rates of women in almost all academic fields (Lee et al., 2013). Supporting the former, research has found that female-authored papers are more likely to be rejected and spend longer in review than male-authored ones (Henkel, 2017), resulting in women having fewer high-impact publications (Upthegrove et al., 2021). Thus, using publications as a measure of ‘academic excellence’ might be far from meritocratic, and disadvantages women. Additionally, successful publishing is also closely linked to grant capture, with each affecting the other. Witteman and colleagues (2019) conducted a natural experiment and found no gender gap when the reviewers primarily considered the project, but there was a significantly large gender gap when reviewers were asked to consider the principal investigator. The researchers claim that their findings represent strong evidence for biased evaluations of female academics.

Recognising women’s disadvantage in 2005, Advance HE developed the Athena SWAN Charter to support the advancement of gender equality in UK Higher Education institutions. The original charter was aimed at academic staff in STEM subjects, but in 2015 it was expanded to include arts, humanities, social sciences, business and law (AHSSBL). Chartered institutions are required to promote gender equality in their policies, practices and action plans. Despite all UK universities having equality and diversity agendas in place, the progress towards gender equality remains slow and is very evident in UK Business Schools (Chang et al., 2020; Farrell et al., 2021).

Research on Business School Gender Gaps

In 2020 the British Academy of Management (BAM) commissioned an Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Respect (EDIR) project to investigate the structural and cultural challenges embedded in UK business and management schools (B&M schools). The report presented findings from the analysis of the quantitative data collected annually via HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) and qualitative data collected from a diverse set of senior academics and leaders who described their experiences of career progression in HE (Śliwa et al., 2021).

The analysis of the HESA data revealed a gender imbalance of 6% in business and management schools in favour of men – a rate that is double that of the UK HEI labour market. Furthermore, the report shows that while there is a good pipeline of female academics, women remain under-represented at the professorial level with a share of 26%. Gender imbalances at the professorial level appear to be exaggerated at Russell Group universities: 25% of professors at Russell Group universities are women compared to 34% at Post 92 universities.

The Intersection between Race and Gender

In addition to gender imbalances and taking intersectionality into account the report shows vertical segregation in terms of race. Intersectionality matters – the gender employment gap is significantly wider for black and ethnic minority academics. Only 28% of B&M schools academics identify as black and ethnic minority. Although this is more than in the general UK university academic workforce, ethnic diversity significantly decreases with academic progression: only 2% of B&M professors identify as black, 2% as mixed and 16% as Asian.

Looking specifically at the demographic characteristics at senior level, the analysis of the qualitative data from a diverse group of senior academics revealed that: 1) white male participants were more often invited to take on senior roles than their female colleagues; 2) jobs stereotypically associated with men (i.e., research management or leadership roles) were seen as more valuable than jobs stereotypically associated with women (i.e., teaching, management); 3) networking activities frequently took part in male friendly places, naturally excluding women; 4) formal, institutionalised equality, diversity, inclusion and respect (EDIR) programmes such as Athena SWAN had little if any, significant impact in terms of changing the culture or practices within B&M schools and 5) subtle, persistent micro failures in EDIR are cumulative over time and have an important negative impact on an individual’s career development.

Everyday Experience: Sexism and Racism is Endemic

Adding to our understanding of culture and practice, further recent research has looked at the everyday experience for women in business schools. Yarrow and Davies (2022) claim that sexism in business schools is ‘endemic’. Drawing on an analysis of publicly available media sources from business school accreditation bodies and media reports, they identify four categories of sexism: belligerent (antagonistic, hostile); benevolent (paternalistic); ambivalent and oblivious (passive and enabling). They find that sexism is inherent in business schools and is undermining efforts to improve equality, diversity and inclusion. Hughes and Donnelly (2023) having integrated statistical data on gender in UK business schools with qualitative data with 52 academics across 15 business schools, argue that sexism is experienced both inside and outside business schools. Similarly, Bourabain (2020), looking at the experiences of 50 early career researchers employed at five Belgian universities finds many (47 of the 50) report everyday sexism and racism, both explicit and subtle. Examples include ‘everyday cloning’ where women were excluded from academic tasks and opportunities such as teaching or research leave. Equality discourse serves as a smoke screen of equality or simply ‘window dressing’ (Bourabain, 2020:255). Gendered and racialized inequalities persist (Bhopal and Henderson, 2021; Sliwa et al., 2022; Yarrow and Davies, 2022). Quantitative research also shows that female professors in business schools experience less job satisfaction than their male counterparts (Krishen et al., 2020) due to the ‘service trap’ – higher teaching loads, extra service expectations and becoming ‘institutional housekeepers’.

Reflections, Conclusions and Future Directions: Where do we go from here?

An opportunity arose to conduct research among the British Academy of Management’s Fellows to look at equality, diversity and inclusion. Our working party included 13 Fellows from a wide range of UK business schools. We asked them for data on the gender and ethnicity of business school professors in their universities. Data was received from eight. This showed that the percentage of female professors ranged between 21% and 45%. Only three of the eight had more than one-third female professors. In one particularly stark example of a UK business school, there were 75% female faculty but only 22% of the professors were female. Data on ethnicity was more difficult to obtain. We expected this to be collected and publicly available data, but that was not the case. As the data on ethnicity was so difficult to obtain, we resorted to counting the numbers of professors with names from ethnic minorities; this data was found on the business school website academic staff lists. This showed the number of ethnic minority professors being very low. For example, three business schools had none or one. The best had 28% but we suspect double counting due to the way the school was structured.

Given the inequalities the data revealed, we looked to see what, if any, insight the promotion criteria from three of the business schools could offer. What was striking was the overwhelming number of criteria and the lack of clarity about those criteria. For example, one business school’s promotion document was 26 pages long and included some very vague criteria such as ‘considerable external examining experience’.

To redress the inequalities demonstrated in both the quantitative and qualitative data, B&M schools need to take a number of actions. Primarily, they need to acknowledge the nature and extent of the problem. They need both internal and external accountability in their governance structures. They need to monitor, measure, and publish their figures on gender, race and pay equality. They need to set targets for equality (e.g. 35% female professors within three years) and monitor progress towards those targets (Vinnicombe et al., 2020; Eikhof, 2024). Lancaster University Management School has already begun to do this. (LUMS, 2023). Business and management schools must actively tackle institutional and cultural sexism (Yarrow and Davies, 2022). Given B&M school’s role in leadership, they need to actively promote equality, focussing on the instruments that the law in the UK already provides. They may for example request anonymized CVs from candidates in recruitment and promotion processes, or, give women who take time out for maternity leave six months off teaching and administration duties to catch up with their research. Greater clarity and transparency of promotion requirements and processes are needed. Perhaps career workshops open to all faculty could focus on promotion requirements and developing a case for promotion for those on different contracts (teaching and research versus teaching only).

In conclusion, the aforementioned research and report findings point to many inequalities suggesting deep structural problems in UK B&M schools, which need acknowledging and immediate action. In the corporate business world, much progress has been made in the UK in terms of challenging male-dominated corporate boards through the use of targets and required annual gender diversity reporting. Perhaps it is time that some of these lessons be applied to B&M schools.

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