The global statistics that frame the article are stark. A report cited by the authors found that only 18 percent of the world’s leading universities were headed by a woman in a chief executive, vice-chancellor, or presidential role. In Asian contexts the disparity is particularly pronounced. Japan reports just 2.3 percent of women in academic leadership positions, while Kuwait and India each report approximately 3 percent, and Hong Kong reports no female vice-chancellors at all. Women remain absent from the highest levels of academic responsibility in Bangladesh, in both STEM and non-STEM disciplines. By contrast, European universities report 23.6 percent of women as heads of higher education institutions, the United States reports 33 percent of college and university presidents as women, and the United Kingdom reports 29.6 percent of vice-chancellors as women with a continuing upward trend. Yet even these Western figures, the authors note, remain well short of population parity, which means the problem is global in scope even where progress has been most meaningful.

To understand what drives these patterns, the authors systematically examine seven leadership styles through the lens of gender, drawing on leadership style theory as a foundational framework for analyzing gender-differentiated approaches to authority, collaboration, and decision-making. Transformational leadership, the style most consistently associated with female leaders in the empirical literature, is defined by visionary and inspirational behavior that encourages innovation and creativity within teams. A comprehensive meta-analysis by Eagly, Johannesen-Schmidt, and van Engen compared gender differences across transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire styles and found transformational leadership associated with higher perceived effectiveness across organizational contexts. At IMU University, the female top leaders encountered by the authors are characterized by inspiration drawn from their own outstanding professional achievements, innovation cultivated through the consistent challenge of working within resource constraints, and visionary adaptability in response to demands from investors, professional bodies, and regulatory stakeholders.

Transactional leadership, by contrast, emphasizes structure, routine, and established procedures, employing a system of rewards and penalties within a defined chain of command. In the authors’ institutional experience, this style is most commonly practiced by female leaders operating at the middle level of management, particularly those responsible for unit, departmental, or financial portfolios. The transactional orientation, they suggest, emerges organically from the pressures of deadline compliance and cost-efficiency management inherent in the dual academic-corporate structure of a private higher education institution, where academic leaders must simultaneously ensure quality and regulatory compliance while managing human and financial resources in partnership with corporate leadership. Servant leadership, which prioritizes the needs of team members and the institution above the leader’s own, is adopted at IMU by female leaders who work closely with communities and lead community-engaged projects, a style well-suited to environments demanding a balance between demonstrable outcomes and sustained stakeholder satisfaction at the frontline of service delivery.

The remaining styles complicate any simple gender mapping. Democratic leadership, which involves team members in decision-making and ensures all voices are heard, is more commonly observed among junior leaders at IMU and is not gender-specific, particularly where a leader is managing peers at the same level of seniority. Autocratic and laissez-faire styles are likewise not gender-specific in the authors’ observation: autocratic leadership is frequently adopted interchangeably with other styles during acute crises, while laissez-faire approaches are more common at the highest organizational levels where strategic autonomy is appropriate. A 2024 systematic literature review on laissez-faire leadership in higher education found significant relationships between this style and academic performance, faculty satisfaction, and innovation, while noting that its effectiveness depends heavily on contextual factors including institutional culture. Influential leadership, which deploys personal charisma and persuasive capacity to energize followers, is most visible in senior figures with prolific professional backgrounds, and its expression reflects individual biography rather than gender identity. The authors are careful to acknowledge the framework’s limits: style typologies are descriptive rather than explanatory, most style research has been conducted in Western organizational contexts and may not translate directly to Asian health professions education settings, and in practice effective academic leaders draw on multiple styles simultaneously depending on context, team composition, and institutional demands.

Two theoretical traditions supply the conceptual grounding for interpreting the observed patterns. Social role theory proposes that gender differences in leadership behavior arise from internalized socially prescribed gender roles, making leadership effectiveness a function of the fit between gender role expectations and the perceived demands of the role in a specific institutional context. Intersectionality theory, originating in Crenshaw’s critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, argues that gender operates in dynamic interaction with race, ethnicity, and institutional context. In the Malaysian higher education landscape, where ethnic diversity is salient across the academic workforce, the leadership trajectories of female academics from different ethnic communities are likely to differ in ways that a gender-only analysis may obscure, and the authors call for future empirical research on female leadership in Malaysian private universities to incorporate intersectional analytic frameworks.

The structural and cultural drivers of female underrepresentation are well established in the literature the authors review. O’Connor’s feminist institutional analysis demonstrates the clustering of women in lower-level academic and administrative positions, with a pronounced attrition in female representation as seniority increases. The significant reasons identified across the literature include cultural and social factors, restrictive national policies, personal barriers, inadequate family support structures, limited institutional interest in female advancement, and formal organizational barriers. Sociocultural stereotypes constitute a primary barrier: influenced by prevailing gendered cultural norms, female leaders sometimes resist or reject their leader identity in order not to contravene existing expectations, contributing to the phenomenon of the glass ceiling. Recruitment and promotion systems continue to advantage men in many institutions, and in certain cultural contexts workplaces remain gender-segregated, compelling women to navigate discriminatory practices simply to maintain their professional positions. Inadequate access to training, mentorship, and professional networks further disadvantages women seeking leadership roles, while asymmetric domestic responsibilities remain a primary constraint on female academics’ career advancement. Temporary work arrangements, male-dominated informal networks, intimidation, pay disparities, and opaque appointment processes complete the cluster of barriers.

Against this backdrop, the IMU trajectory stands out. Malaysian higher education statistics for 2021 indicate a substantially higher proportion of female academicians relative to male across the twenty Malaysian public universities, with 17,751 female versus 12,629 male academicians, a trend that extends into the private sector. The pipeline of qualified female academics available for leadership development is therefore expanding, although representation of women in health professions education remains concentrated at middle management and junior faculty levels, with senior leadership equity remaining a persistent challenge across the sector. At IMU, selection for leadership roles has been explicitly based on professional credibility, demonstrated expertise, collaborative capacity, and institutional commitment rather than gender, and the composition of the leadership team has incorporated a balance of genders, ethnicities, and nationalities since the institution’s establishment. Benchmarking with international collaborators from Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region has reinforced diversity and inclusion as a foundational principle of organizational culture rather than a performative policy. The authors also point to a self-selecting alignment between the education sector’s nurturing, student-centered values and the dispositional orientation of many women who choose careers in healthcare education, an alignment between institutional mission and individual leadership disposition that may help explain the relative equity of female leadership representation observed at IMU compared to the broader sector.

The article’s discussion converges on four conclusions that challenge dominant assumptions about female leadership in Asian higher education. First, the persistent narrative that women are less effective as leaders in Asian academic settings is not supported by the authors’ observation at IMU nor by the emerging cross-national literature. Second, leadership style is a more nuanced and contextually determined variable than simple gender categorization suggests: while transformational and servant styles are more commonly associated with female leaders internationally, female leaders at IMU demonstrate considerable flexibility across the full spectrum, transactional when managing resource-constrained environments, influential when advocating for institutional direction, and democratic when building consensus among peers. Gender predicts tendency, not repertoire. Third, institutional culture is a more powerful determinant of female leadership advancement than national context alone, suggesting that institutional agency, the deliberate decisions made by leadership about culture, appointment, and development, can meaningfully counter structural national-level gender inequity. Fourth, the rising proportion of female academicians in Malaysian higher education represents a structural opportunity for sector-wide leadership equity, with the challenge lying in translating workforce representation into senior leadership appointment through targeted development, mentorship, and removal of systemic appointment barriers.

The authors are candid about the limitations of their account. The Perspective is grounded in personal experience at a single private health professions university, and the generalisability of the IMU model to public universities, research-intensive institutions, and non-healthcare disciplines cannot be assumed. The experiences reported are perspectival rather than systematically collected, representing qualitative reflexive accounts rather than findings from a formal empirical study. The authors also acknowledge that the institutional trajectory admits alternative explanations: IMU’s relative gender equity may partly reflect the composition of healthcare education workforces, which are disproportionately female at the practitioner level and therefore produce a larger pipeline of female candidates, and the private institutional model, characterized by greater managerial flexibility and less dependence on national civil service structures, may enable faster departure from historically male-dominated appointment patterns than public universities. All three authors hold or have held leadership positions at the very institution whose leadership culture is evaluated favorably, creating a risk of institutional advocacy and confirmation bias that the authors have sought to mitigate by grounding institutional claims in the international literature and proposing an agenda for external empirical investigation. The proposed framework, centered on shared leadership, merit-based appointment, founding-level commitment to gender and ethnic diversity, and an organizational culture shaped by healthcare education values, now awaits the quantitative scrutiny of appointment data, leadership effectiveness indicators, and staff satisfaction measures across comparable institutions in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. If the IMU model proves replicable, the implications for how institutions across the region cultivate female academic leaders could be profound.

Subject of Research: Social Science

Article Title: Female academic leadership in private higher education: gender dynamics and leadership effectiveness

Article References: Syed Aznal, S. S., Nagandla, K., & Ponnudurai, G. (2026). Female academic leadership in private higher education: gender dynamics and leadership effectiveness. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1886954. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1886954

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1886954

Keywords: female academic leadership, gender equity, higher education, leadership styles, Malaysia, private university, shared leadership, transformational leadership, Female, academic, leadership, private