Dual rejection: Senior and middle women leader's identity negotiation strategy in China's HEIs

Where women leaders experience ‘identity trouble’, the problem has been argued to lie in their multiple identity conflicts, especially the incompatibility between the dominant discourses about women and leaders. In China, the conflict between the two has become more acute in the present period of social change. To explore and interrogate the interplay of gender, leadership and identity, this paper draws on in-depth narrative interviews with eight women leaders in higher education. I propose a new concept of ‘dual rejection’ to explain women leaders’ management of their multiple contradictory identities. I argue that to achieve a relatively stable and internally consistent identity logic, women leaders may reject both leadership and woman identities. Notably, the degree and strategy of rejection is based on the ordering of identities, in which the identity of ‘woman’ is given priority, and the management strategy of other identities is based on their compatibility with this. The article also argues that the rejection of the woman identity is a way of reconciling the conflicting dominant discourses in China concerning women and leadership.