Project Aims:
- Build a knowledge exchange e-resource that provides free access to resources and project assets and outputs and supports knowledge exchange and replication of the work in new contexts and with new audiences including HE leaders and managers and those responsible for STEM people development in Universities;
- Sustain practice change and momentum through creation of an STEM-POWER Community of Practice (CoP) that hosts a network of role models, peer mentors and critical friends to support ongoing capacity and capability building;
- Connect the STEM-POWER CoP to wider international networks, EnPOWER Vietnam and International Professional Development Association (IPDA) to extend reach and connectivity.
Project Team:
Julia Everitt
Why STEM-POWER is important
The Gender Equality Partnerships call for projects in the Indonesian context specifically seeks to explore women’s under-representation in STEM research (only 36% of post-doctoral researchers are women) and STEM research leadership (only 36% BRIN research grant holders are women).
The efficacy of the pipeline supporting women’s progression to STEM research leadership in Indonesia is under-researched. As such there are few tools with which institutional leaders and those responsible for talent management within Indonesian Universities might a) interrogate local cultures and practices in relation to research leadership and b) understand the health of the researcher development pipeline. Whilst the World Bank estimates that women’s participation in STEM based higher education has plateaued, in 2018 only 37.4% of graduates with STEM degrees were women representing a marginal decrease from 37.5% in 2014 the first year of data available, very similar to the number of women represented as post-doctoral researchers, voids in the research literature make it difficult to understand women researcher’s experiences of points of transition in the pipeline and potential progression to leadership roles in research.
Researchers in the wider field of leadership in Indonesia note a “dearth of studies” (Arquisola and Rentschler 2023) on leadership of all kinds with Mulya and Sakhiyya noting only 4 articles on Gender and Leadership in Higher Education their 2021 review. As such the particular experiences of women research leaders in the field of STEM remain invisible. Crucially Mulya and Sakhiyya noted that none of these local studies explored how “university leaders perceive, interpret, and enact their roles within prevailing institutional conditions, and socio-cultural discourses”. They also noted as a significant short-coming “a lack of knowledge on indigenous conceptions of leadership in non-Western-based contexts, such as Indonesia (Hallinger & Walker, Citation2011).” They note the importance of “expanding the knowledge base” to make a response to this short-coming and noted in their conclusions the importance of understanding women’s leadership relationally to conceptualisations of masculinity, identity and leadership which they describe as also under-researched.
Although nascent, the existing literature notices the “importance of local culture” (Priyatna, 2013) and the significant impacts of both external barriers, such as “participation and representation in tertiary institutions” (Harahap et al 2022), and internal barriers such as “domestic affairs, psychological and emotional, ego and arrogance, and time management, playing a bigger role as impediments (Ibid).” Other researchers in the wider field of gender and leadership in Indonesia note similar intersections between structural relations and women leaders’ identity-making. McClaren et al’s 2019 rapid review of Indonesian women in public service noted “barriers frequently outweigh opportunities for career advancement; these including entrenched homo-sociability asserting that men make better leaders. Consequently, the blocking of women’s opportunities invoked personal disappointments, resulting in women’s public denial of their leadership ambitions.” This echoed Andajani et al’s (2016) earlier study study of 30 female community members, university students, lecturers, professionals, and women’s activists which concluded that women leaders faced a complexity of barriers alongside consistent stigmatization.
As a new provocation to counter these deep-seated inequalities and accelerate women’s advancement in STEM the Asia Foundation advocate for the importance of networks of ‘women supporting women’ as strategies for building visibility and agency. They call for networks to: Leverage powerholders in the network and the network’s collective identity for progress: Encourage network members to participate in multiple, diverse networks: Contribute to the creation of an association of women-in-STEM networks.
Funder:
British Council Going Global: Gender Equality Partnerships grant
Contact:
For more information on the project please contact amanda.french@bcu.ac.uk