From Intersectionality to Substantive Representation: Determinants of the Representation of Women Faculty in Academic Contexts: Voices of Egyptian Academic Leaders

Through addressing four public universities in Egypt, the author of the present study seeks to answer the question of why women faculty are poorly represented in both professorial and academic managerial positions. Upon conducting semi-structured interviews with 22 academic leaders in the addressed universities, the author of the present paper has found that the representation of women faculty is determined by both cultural barriers (e.g., familial obligations, the think manager think male culture, religious barriers) and institutional limitations (e.g., lack of administrative support, gender bias, greediness of academic institutions). To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first of its kind in the context of a developing nation to focus on the representation of women faculty from the perspective of academic leaders, and subsequently, it fills a gap in HR management, public administration and higher education, in which empirical studies that address academic leaders to identify their perceptions of the representation of their female colleagues have been limited so far.