This research is all about gender, management, and academic leadership. Although, academic success is assumed to be based on individual achievement and hard work, for some reason the top positions are held by certain type of people. To put it bluntly, look who are the most professors, and you might get an impression that the academic achievement correlates with whiteness and masculinity. This observation is interesting, as according to numbers more and more women are entering the world of academia.

Reproducing and reconstructing gender uniformity in academia
While there has been done research about leaky pipes and academic snakes and ladders, in this research the focus will be on local practices reproducing and reconstructing gender uniformity in academia. The aim is to find out how local managerial practices, local understandings of femininities and masculinities, and local definitions of academic identities facilitate the reconstruction of gender uniformity in academia? Furthermore, how the local practices intersect with the global developments in higher education?

Comparative study
In this research it is suggested that gender uniformity is the result of the interplay between the individual, the professional, and the institutional fields.  To explore how these fields intersect in reconstructing gender uniformity, two business schools will be compared. One will be based in Finland and the other in the United Kingdom. The data will be collected through observations, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis.

This research will contribute to discussions about gender diversity in academia, and the aim is to create a theoretical framework that can be applied when trying to figure out other diversity issues in academia.