Pursuing intellectual leadership in neoliberal academia: a focus on tenure-track women scholars in China

This study investigates the multifaceted challenges faced by tenure-track women scholars in China as they navigate the pursuit of intellectual leadership within a neoliberal academic system. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 12 women and 5 men tenure-track academics, the research highlights how institutional policies, gendered expectations, and managerial reforms intersect to create systemic barriers for women. The findings reveal how China’s tenure-track reforms, modeled on neoliberal principles of competition and audit culture, intensify precarity for women. Women scholars face heightened scrutiny with time constraints under performative metrics, gendered role expectations, and a lack of institutional support for work-life merge. Notably, the study identifies emergent coping strategies, including self-censorship and fragmentation of research into “publishable” units, which undermine long-term intellectual leadership. The analysis critiques the paradox of tenure as a managerial tool: while ostensibly promoting meritocracy, it reinforces masculinist norms and marginalizes alternative forms of scholarly contribution. Three primary obstacles emerge. First, policy dyssynchrony reflects the misalignment between extended age limits for grant applications and rigid tenure-track age caps, forcing women to reconcile career advancement with biological and caregiving timelines. Second, ambiguity in rewarding mechanisms disproportionately disadvantages women by undervaluing their contributions to teaching, mentoring, and service—tasks often framed as “academic housework”—while privileging quantifiable research outputs in promotion criteria. Third, the veneer of gender-neutral rhetoric obscures structural inequalities, attributing disparities to individual choices rather than systemic biases, such as male-dominated academic cliques that control resources and networking opportunities. The study calls for policy synchronization, transparent reward systems, and accountability frameworks addressing systemic—not just individual—barriers. By centering the experiences of women scholars, this research contributes to global debates on gender equality in academia, the erosion of intellectual autonomy under neoliberalism, and the need for institutional reforms to foster inclusive intellectual leadership.