The leadership gap is not a pipeline problem: structural barriers to women's academic leadership in the Mediterranean

Published by Paeradigms | April 2026

On 23 April 2026, the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), in partnership with the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation, hosted a high-level webinar titled Leading the Future: Women at the Helm of Mediterranean Science and Higher Education. Convened to shift the conversation from participation to leadership, the event brought together university leaders, policymakers, and scientists from across Europe and the wider Mediterranean region to examine why women remain systematically absent from the highest levels of academic governance and scientific leadership. Paeradigms participated in the webinar, and this article draws on that discussion alongside recent empirical research to examine the structural roots of a problem that stubbornly resists easy solutions.

The webinar was organised around two pillars: academic leadership, concerned with university governance and institutional reform, and scientific leadership, concerned with research agendas and science diplomacy. Giuseppe Provenzano, Project Manager for Research and Innovation at the UfM, introduced the event's keynote speakers and moderated the scientific leadership panel, framing an afternoon that was, at its best, willing to name mechanisms rather than just symptoms.

Beyond the pipeline: why women's absence at the top is not a supply problem

The dominant policy narrative about women in academia still leans on the pipeline metaphor: if enough women enter the system, enough will eventually reach the top. The numbers are enough to disprove this. Women now make up the majority of graduates across the Euro-Mediterranean region, exceeding 50% of STEM graduates in Syria and Tunisia against a global average of 35%, and their share of the research workforce has grown from 36% to 41% (UNESCO, 2024). Yet at EU level, women occupy only 26% of head-of-institution positions (She Figures, 2024). Women are in the pipeline. The pipeline is not the problem.

Petra Kežman, Deputy Secretary General of the UfM, opened the event by naming this directly:

"It is not about lack of talent or ambition. It is about structural barriers that continue to shape who leads, who decides, and whose voices count."

Research confirms this. Järvinen and Mik-Meyer (2024) document that in Danish universities, women and men enter at equal numbers at doctoral level, but women account for only a quarter of full professorships. French academic medicine shows a starker version of the same pattern: women represent 49% of medical staff but only 15% of full professors (Rosso et al., 2019). The gap is not explained by productivity. There is no measurable difference in scientific output between men and women in comparable positions. It is explained by the mechanisms through which institutions evaluate, promote, and select leaders.

This distinction matters because pipeline thinking produces pipeline solutions: mentoring programmes, confidence workshops, leadership academies for women. These are not worthless. But they locate the deficit in the individual rather than in the institution. They ask women to adapt to structures that were never designed with them in mind, and in doing so, quietly exonerate those structures from scrutiny.

How institutions reproduce what they could change

The webinar's most substantive contributions came from those who named mechanisms. Prof. Isabelle Régner of Aix-Marseille University, drawing on social and cognitive psychology, described how implicit bias shapes recruitment and promotion in ways that are systematic rather than merely incidental:

"Research shows that gender stereotypes operate through automatic cognitive processes that influence how we evaluate competence and leadership potential. These barriers are not necessarily conscious, but they are systematic."

This is well-documented. O'Connor (2018) identifies multiple reinforcing mechanisms: biased CV evaluation, criteria for academic merit that favour masculine career patterns, and informal networks from which women are structurally excluded. Nielsen (2020) shows that even ostensibly neutral evaluation tools can perpetuate inequality: the Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator, designed to measure research quality objectively, systematically disadvantages research approaches more common among women. Järvinen and Mik-Meyer (2024) describe this as epistemic positioning: women's scholarship is bounded, labelled peripheral, and excluded from the disciplinary centre that men define and occupy.

Networking is a particularly underanalysed mechanism. Régner identified co-optation and informal social networks as one of the most persistent structural barriers in recruitment. When leadership succession is shaped by who already sits at the table, and those tables are predominantly male, the exclusion is self-perpetuating. Clarke et al. (2024) show how the discourse of meritocracy actively reinforces this: leaders who believe in their own objectivity feel less need to examine their decisions for bias. Meritocracy, far from being a corrective, becomes cover. Managers convinced of their own fairness are, paradoxically, more likely to reproduce inequality than those who approach evaluation with deliberate scrutiny.

The organisational culture of universities deepens these effects. Dubois-Shaik and Fusulier (2017) describe European universities as operating under a "greedy institution" model that treats continuous, uninterrupted career engagement as the marker of serious scholarship. This norm is not gender-neutral. It penalises caregiving, and caregiving remains structurally asymmetric. Carvalho and Diogo (2018) add a further wrinkle: women who do reach senior positions sometimes inadvertently reinforce these norms by attributing their own success purely to individual merit, contributing to narratives that implicitly blame other women for not achieving the same.

Gender equality plans: structural tool or compliance exercise?

A central policy debate at the webinar concerned the Gender Equality Plan (GEP), now a formal requirement under Horizon Europe for access to EU research funding. Maria Cristina Russo, Deputy Director General for Research and Innovation at the European Commission, made the institutional intent clear:

"It is not just a symbolic requirement. It is a structural one, and it is a requirement that we believe can make the change."

The evidence is cautiously supportive of this intent, but it points sharply to implementation failures. Afiouni et al. (2023), in research spanning ten European countries and Lebanon, find that GEPs vary enormously in quality and actual impact, ranging from genuinely transformative institutional tools to documents designed to satisfy funders rather than change anything. The risk, raised explicitly at the webinar by Régner, is that plans become formal rather than operational. As she put it plainly: what is not measured is easy to ignore.

The conditions for a GEP to function are demanding. It requires disaggregated data, context-specific actions with clear accountability, governing-body ownership, and a genuine theory of change that engages with the mechanisms producing inequality. A generic diversity training attached to an otherwise unchanged hiring process will not shift structural patterns. Neither will a plan that lives in the gender equality office but has no reach into promotion committees or resource allocation decisions.

Prof. Selim Mekdessi, Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration at the Lebanese University, was direct on this point:

"A plan becomes effective when it moves from statements to mechanisms. If a plan says 'we support equality', that is positive, but insufficient."

Régner described a concrete example from Aix-Marseille University that illustrates the difference. By introducing a standardised protocol for recruitment committees, including the Implicit Association Test and structured discussion of how automatic biases function in evaluation, the university increased the proportion of women recruited as full professors without quotas or mandates. The mechanism was not injunction but institutionalised awareness, deployed at the moment decisions are actually made. The result was incremental but measurable.

The question is whether Horizon Europe's GEP requirement, in practice, pushes institutions towards this kind of operational change or settles for the paperwork version. There is real reason for scepticism. When compliance is the primary incentive, institutions tend to do the minimum necessary to demonstrate it. Without independent monitoring of implementation quality, the requirement risks producing a large archive of equality plans that change very little.

The Mediterranean dimension: variation in form, consistency in structure

One of the webinar's more productive tensions was between the specificity of national contexts and the cross-regional consistency of the underlying mechanisms. The region is not uniform, and collapsing it into a single picture obscures important variation.

Countries in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean face pressures that are structurally distinct from those in southern or western Europe. Rahbari (2016) documents explicit formal exclusion in Iran: declared male-only hiring in public universities, women holding only 18.25% of tenure-track positions, and cultural barriers rooted in patriarchal institutional logics that operate both formally and informally. Lebanon, as Mekdessi acknowledged at the webinar, contends with a paternalist institutional culture in which inequalities persist not through explicit policy but through habits, assumptions, and networks.

Yet Turkey, a counterintuitive case, shows that structural design matters more than cultural starting points. Healy et al. (2005) attribute Turkey's 27% women-professors figure, the highest in Europe at the time despite one of the lowest female labour participation rates in the region, to centralised, transparent promotion systems and ideological state support rather than legal equal opportunity frameworks. The Turkish case is useful precisely because it disrupts cultural determinism: transparency in promotion can partially offset cultural norms. It does not, however, eliminate work-family conflicts, and family ideology still constrains women's choices.

Prof. Olfa Bouallègue, Vice President of the University of Sousse, speaking from a North African institutional context, captured the cross-regional truth:

"Institutional culture is decisive. Policy can exist on paper, but what truly matters is whether inclusion is practised, valued and normalised in everyday governance."

This applies in Tunis, Amsterdam, and Beirut alike. The mechanisms of exclusion, including biased evaluation, masculinised norms, and opaque networks, are remarkably consistent across very different national settings. What varies is the cultural justification, not the structure of the inequality. European institutions should be careful not to read this as confirmation that the problem lies elsewhere. Clarke et al. (2024) document identical dynamics in UK Russell Group universities. Denmark, known for progressive gender policies, shows the same epistemic marginalisation of women's scholarship as more conservative contexts (Järvinen and Mik-Meyer, 2024). The mechanisms transcend borders.

What institutional transformation actually requires

The shift needed is from treating gender equality as a representation target to treating it as a governance problem. Prof. Mekdessi made the core point:

"It is the difference between being present at the table and being able to shape a strategy, to shape what happens around the table."

The research synthesis, and the better moments of the webinar, converge on a consistent set of interventions. Transparent, criteria-based recruitment processes reduce the scope for network-based co-optation (Nielsen, 2020). Disaggregated data on representation, promotion rates, and committee membership make inequalities visible and provide an objective basis for accountability. Mandatory, well-designed training for evaluation committees, embedded in actual hiring decisions rather than offered as optional professional development, can reduce the operation of implicit bias where it matters most (Girod et al., 2016). Leadership development programmes that treat leadership as a learnable set of skills, not a natural attribute of the already-advantaged, widen access in a way that mentoring alone does not.

None of this is frictionless. Régner noted that resistance is itself a signal:

"When resistance begins to decline, it is often a sign that a transformation is actually taking place."

That is a useful heuristic for institutions willing to monitor honestly. But it should not obscure the fact that change of this kind requires sustained institutional will, dedicated resources, and governing bodies that treat gender equality as a strategic priority rather than a compliance requirement. Where that will is absent, plans stall and gaps persist. Teelken et al. (2021) show that in Dutch universities, micro-political practices including nepotism and academic inbreeding reproduced male-dominated promotion patterns even in the presence of formal equality policies. Policy without power to enforce change in informal practices achieves very little.

The UfM's regional programme Women Leading Change, supported by the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation and working with ten universities across Morocco, Lebanon, and Syria, operates on the premise that institutional transformation requires diagnosis, structured capacity building, and sustained accountability. That premise is right. The questions worth asking are how rigorously the diagnosis is conducted, how deeply the capacity building reaches into the informal structures where exclusion is actually generated, and how accountability is maintained when political conditions shift. These are not rhetorical questions. The answers will determine whether the programme produces lasting structural change or another layer of well-documented good intentions.

Higher education institutions across the Mediterranean have the policy architecture and, in many cases, the political momentum to move. What they need is not more programmes about women's confidence. They need governing bodies willing to examine their own recruitment committees, promotion criteria, and resource allocation decisions with the same rigour they apply to research quality. That shift, from managing representation to transforming the structures that determine who gets to lead, is where the work actually lies.

References

.Afiouni, F., Apospori, E., Darwish, H., et al. (2023). Overcoming gender bias in higher education institutions: The importance of gender equality plans. Academy of Management Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.5465/amproc.2023.15761symposium

Carvalho, T. and Diogo, S. (2018). Women rectors and leadership narratives: The same male norm? Education Sciences, 8(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/EDUCSCI8020075

Carvalho, T. and Santiago, R. (2010). New challenges for women seeking an academic career: The hiring process in Portuguese higher education institutions. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 32(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/13600801003743331

Clarke, J., Hurst, C. and Tomlinson, J. (2024). Maintaining the meritocracy myth: A critical discourse analytic study of leaders' talk about merit and gender in academia. Organization Studies. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406241236610

Dubois-Shaik, F. and Fusulier, B. (2017). Understanding gender inequality and the role of the work/family interface in contemporary academia. European Educational Research Journal, 16(2-3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904117701143

Girod, S., Fassiotto, M., Grewal, D., et al. (2016). Reducing implicit gender leadership bias in academic medicine with an educational intervention. Academic Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000001099

Healy, G., Özbilgin, M. F. and Aliefendioğlu, H. (2005). Academic employment and gender: A Turkish challenge to vertical sex segregation. European Journal of Industrial Relations, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/0959680105053966

Järvinen, M. and Mik-Meyer, N. (2024). At the heart or on the periphery: Gender, (in)visibility and epistemic positioning in academia. Gender and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2024.2442923