Many of the sector's best educators want to step up — from coordinator, to program lead, to Associate Dean, to sector leadership — but the path rarely comes with a map. Rate yourself across six evidence-based leadership capabilities and get a development pathway matched to free NTLSN tools and the sector's leadership programs.
Gender is one barrier to leadership — and programs like WATTLE that confront it are vital. But it is not the only one. Who gets to lead in our universities is shaped by intersecting dimensions of power and privilege: cultural and linguistic background, race, migration story, accent, sexuality, disability, age and class — and the quieter biases we rarely name aloud, like appearance, bearing, or the sound of a name. They seldom act one at a time; they compound. That is intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989).
The evidence is stark. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s Leading for Change found that senior leadership across Australian institutions — Vice-Chancellors among them — remains overwhelmingly of Anglo-Celtic and European background, with culturally and linguistically diverse Australians, and people of colour, markedly underrepresented at the top, even where they are well represented in the workforce below.
NTLSN’s leadership mission is intersectional. Not a deficit story — no one here needs fixing — but a commitment to naming the structural barriers, and to backing leaders of every background, identity and difference to thrive within the structures as they are, while we work to change them. A sector rebuilds trust, in part, by making sure the people who lead it look like the people in it.
A Swinburne-convened, cross-institutional leadership program for women in higher education and research, with 400+ alumnae across ~17 universities. Three streams:
Themes: leadership context · career development · leading & managing change · leadership in action. Enquiries: WATTLE_Admin@swin.edu.au · HEW 8 (Karen Teo): kteo@swin.edu.au.