It is not a man's world: perceptions by male faculty of the status and representation of their female colleagues

Abstract

PurposeBy studying four public universities in Egypt, the author of this paper aims to identify how male faculty perceive the representation and status of their female colleagues.Design/methodology/approachThe author employed a qualitative research method via semi-structured interviews with 40 male academics in addition to five focus group discussions with an additional 20 male academics. The author subsequently used thematic analysis to determine the main ideas in the transcripts.FindingsThe findings confirmed that women faculty are not under-represented at professorial levels, but they are denied administrative academic positions, such as rectors and deans in universities. The author also discovered that the social norms shaping both national and organizational culture in Egypt create a cultural bias against women faculty.Originality/valueTo 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 status and representation of women faculty from the perspective of male colleagues, and subsequently, it is the first to address the higher education sector in one of the leading developing nations in Africa and the Middle East. This paper contributes by filling a gap in HR management and higher education, in which empirical studies that address male faculty to identify their perceptions of the status and representation of their female colleagues have been limited so far.