Work Identity and Gendered Liminal Spaces in Inclusive Leadership Development: A Higher Education Case Study

We take an organisation -wide approach to exploring the complexities of gender and leadership at work, with a focus on action. Within the context of a university, with an Anglican Foundation, the paper provides a specific workplace lens. The research is central to a wider project, designed to further the organisation’s understanding of leadership and gender, to be better placed to promote inclusion, facilitate change, enable shared learning and support knowledge transfer. As part of a participatory, qualitative design, semi structured interviews were conducted. Interviews involved 17 participants, aged over 18 years, gender identities consisted of 14 females and 3 males, from within professional and academic services within the University. Framework Analysis was employed as it lends itself to a team approach and further enabled a collaborative exploration of findings. The main findings were centred around liminal spaces in leadership development and the gendered nature of leadership. These findings have informed the development of recommendations to ensure organisational engagement in the development, and therefore the sustainability, of action taken.