This paper aims to examine how women academic leaders in Higher Education navigate leadership at the intersection of gender, race and social class. It explores how intersecting identities shape women’s experiences of power, belonging and legitimacy within academic institutions, and how they negotiate privilege and inequality in leadership contexts.
A qualitative, feminist standpoint design was adopted, using unstructured interviews with 10 women in senior academic leadership roles at a UK university. Data was analysed thematically through an intersectional lens to capture how gender, race and class interacted to shape leadership experiences.
Three interrelated dynamics were identified: leadership under the gendered gaze, the structural reproduction of whiteness and conditional privilege and classed belonging within elite institutional cultures. Academic leadership was shaped by White, middle-class and masculinised norms that structured both opportunity and legitimacy. Participants exercised agency through relational leadership, reflexivity and collective practices. Yet their experiences demonstrated how privilege and marginalisation were co-constituted, extending intersectionality from critique towards praxis.
The study draws on a single UK Higher Education Institution and a small, self-selecting sample of participants. Comparative or cross-national research could further explore how organisational contexts shape intersectional leadership.
Leadership and equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives should embed intersectional reflection, address whiteness and class privilege alongside gender, and promote allyship and anti-racist practice to create genuinely inclusive leadership cultures.
This study extends intersectional analyses of leadership by showing how privilege and marginalisation can co-exist within women’s experiences. It argues that performative EDI frameworks risk maintaining systemic hierarchies when whiteness and class privilege remain unexamined. The paper advances the case for intersectional praxis in leadership development and policy, moving beyond representational approaches to structural and cultural transformation.
