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This study provides the first systematic review of the literature on women's leadership in higher education in Nigeria, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The primary aim of the review was to identify themes related to barriers and explore strategies suggested in the literature to overcome obstacles hindering women's academic leadership. The study undertook a systematic literature review of 37 articles published in the decade between 2013 and 2023 arising from an externally funded research project on gender equality. Three databases (ERIC, Scopus, Web of Science) were searched using the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) protocol to select eligible articles. The findings revealed a predominance of qualitative studies in existing scholarship, with a specific focus on the lived experiences of women. Recurring barriers identified were gender bias and stereotyping, family-work conflicts, heavy workload and financial constraints, male-dominated leadership culture, the intersection of race and gender, and lack of role models. The literature proposes several measures to address the underrepresentation of women in academic leadership positions. These measures are classified into professional development and training, the policy agenda and organisational change, and support mechanisms and networking. The insights gained from this review aim to shed light on the barriers faced by women academics and the strategies proposed to overcome these challenges in the three target countries, providing higher education institutions with recommendations to address gender inequalities within their organisations.
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Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.