Abstract
The underrepresentation of women in leadership positions in academia is a challenge to advancing gender equity in Vietnam. While there have been many studies about the lack of women leaders in the West, the meaning and practice of leadership studies are not relevant to the culture and situation in Vietnam.This study explores how women in senior academic positions experience and make sense of leadership in Vietnam by inviting these women to collect photos that represent their leadership journey and to talk about them in semi-structured interviews. Photo-elicitation interviews enable the researcher to have deep insights into these women’s perspectives on leadership. The study then uses Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, a qualitative methodology which focuses on lived experiences, to analyse the data.
The most significant finding comes from the Vietnamese language, the world of Vietnamese people living in water. This system is in contrast with the world of people living on land in Western languages. So the glass ceiling or the sticky floor which are popular metaphors from the literature in the West cannot explain the how leadership is experienced or done in Vietnam. For Vietnamese people, life is a river. This metaphor sheds light on how Vietnamese people see the world and helps in understanding the challenges that women have to face in the waterscape. The image that men are captain of the ship inhibits women from becoming leaders, while the image of women swimming along in the river without a life raft shows the challenges women have to face. Going against the current, being washed away in the water, the hidden rocks, the storm or rising up with the tides are the expressions that show the multiples challenges of life in the river for Vietnamese women leaders.
This study also discovers how leadership is embodied. Unlike Cartesian dualism of the mind and body, Vietnamese people consider the abdomen or belly as the seat of thoughts and emotions. Leadership practice does not just come from the head or the heart but from the abdomen, the centre of the body where decisions are made. This finding is in line with current leadership theories about how the guts control the emotions and thoughts of a person.
Discovering how women understand and make sense of leadership in Vietnam explains the lack of women leaders in universities in Vietnam where they are the majority staff. The cultural and social factors of a country with complexities in women’s roles through different stages of history help us understand women leaders’ experiences in Vietnam and add knowledge to the world literature in women’s leadership.
| Date of Award | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Leonora RISSE (Supervisor), Yogi VIDYATTAMA (Supervisor) & Selen AYIRTMAN ERCAN (Supervisor) |