Two Professors, One Project: How Shared Feminist Leadership Rewrote the Rules of Academic Research

Universities like to celebrate the lone genius: the principal investigator whose name sits at the top of a grant application, presiding over a pyramid of postdocs, PhD students and fixed-term staff. Two researchers at the University of Copenhagen spent four years testing whether that model could be replaced by something more democratic without sacrificing scientific excellence. Their answer, published in Frontiers in Education, is a detailed case study of shared, feminist research leadership built on the project Women in Danish Architecture 1925–1975, which Svava Riesto and Henriette Steiner co-led from 2020 to 2024. Their conclusion is striking: not only can two people share the leadership of a funded research project, but doing so can produce better research, a healthier workplace, and a genuine challenge to the individualizing structures of modern academia.

The project itself grew out of a scholarly frustration familiar to many historians. Danish architectural history of the twentieth century, sometimes called the golden age of Danish design, has been told largely through the achievements of a handful of men, including architect Arne Jacobsen, planner Steen Eiler Rasmussen and landscape architect C. Th. Sørensen. When Riesto and Steiner, both trained architectural and cultural historians teaching landscape architecture students, looked at their reading lists and their own lectures, they noticed that women were almost entirely absent, even though women had trained as architects in Denmark since at least 1908. Digging into indexes, footnotes and anecdotal asides in the standard literature, they began to find women’s names everywhere. The project they built set out to revisit Danish architectural history between the 1930s and the 1970s and to tell a story not about heroic individuals but about the collaborations that actually bring built environments into being.

That scholarly aim carried an organizational irony the two leaders could not ignore. A project dedicated to dismantling the myth of the star architect would be led, under conventional academic structures, by a star researcher. The image of the powerful genius professor over junior faculty, they argue, mirrors the hero narratives of architectural history and obscures how innovation actually emerges: within frameworks that foster collaboration, psychological safety and what organizational theorists call generative tension. So they decided the leadership structure of the project had to embody its feminist ethics. Drawing on principles articulated by the UK-based organization We Are Feminist Leaders and by education scholar Tanya Fitzgerald, who describes feminist leadership as a collective social practice involving conscious awareness of one’s own power, they adopted guiding commitments: sharing power, building collective action, practicing shared learning, establishing proactive accountability, and transforming power.

The structural obstacles were immediate. Several Danish grant schemes they applied to permitted only one official research leader. Their workaround was pragmatic and quietly subversive: some proposals named one of them as official leader, others named the other, while every application text stated explicitly that leadership would be shared in practice. They also divided the funds equally in their department’s internal accounting, signaling to local management that both had been equally successful in attracting money, a matter with real consequences for tenure and promotion. The funding bodies raised no objections, though the authors note the practice is unusual in their field. Even so, a senior colleague once advised them not to collaborate at all, warning that working together might hinder their individual careers, an observation that itself illustrates the individualizing pressures the pair were trying to resist.

In searching for alternatives, they examined the leadership models that dominate Danish university management training, as conceptualized by leadership coach Søren Barlebo Rasmussen. The first is the missile or rocket model, in which a recognized researcher leads a team along a strict pathway toward a single goal, with mid-career researchers in a machine room and early-career staff on fixed-term contracts at the bottom of the hierarchy who, in the authors’ pointed reading of the metaphor, deliver the fuel, then burn out and fall away as the project lifts off. The second is the star club model, where senior researchers share infrastructure but work independently, with leadership diffused into invisible systems. The authors find problems with both. The rocket model is monodirectional, rigid and dependent on one individual, with no checks and balances. The star club distributes power but lacks explicit accountability, leaving room for favoritism and the exploitation of those without permanent positions. Neither, they conclude, aligns with feminist principles of proactive accountability and awareness of power relations.

The model they built instead was a dyad: leadership shared between two people at the level of project management. They found precedent in creative fields, including the Danish architectural firm Cobe, art museums such as Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and Spritten in Aalborg, and Copenhagen’s Betty Nansen Teatret. To develop the concept, they worked with organizational psychologist Thea Mikkelsen in sessions they describe as a kind of preventive couples therapy, designed to preempt conflict and build the trust needed to address disagreements constructively. Mikkelsen pointed them to the management book Power of Two by Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller, whose elements of successful two-person partnerships mapped closely onto their practice: complementary strengths, a shared mission, fairness, trust, forgiveness, unselfishness and mutuality, the idea that a partner’s success matters as much as one’s own.

Translating these principles into daily practice required concrete tools. The pair held regular individual development meetings with every team member and joint workshops to make the division of work transparent. They compiled a document outlining the formats of all recurring meetings, because informal ambiguity, they recognized, concentrates power in leaders’ hands. Inspired by the collectively led Danish consultancy Analyse og Tal, team meetings began with a walk around the table in which everyone, the leaders included, reported not just what they were working on but how they felt about their workload, using a traffic-light system: green meant capacity to help others, red meant too much to do. Everyone found themselves in the red zone at times, but after intense periods the team deliberately built in recuperation, an approach the authors connect to regenerative leadership practice and to feminist attunement to bodily and natural cycles, in deliberate contrast to the idealized, masculinized image of the researcher working around the clock.

The results, the authors report, were measurable and intangible. The project produced international publications, invitations from research institutions, a podcast, a guidebook, educational materials for Danish primary schools, and an exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center that attracted 90,000 visitors. It was the first history research project nominated for the Danish Foundation for Entrepreneurship’s Diversity Award and received two dissemination awards from the University of Copenhagen. Team members gave positive feedback on the working culture, and the project generated new networks and professional friendships. The authors are candid that shared leadership is resource-intensive and that their model is highly contextual, not a template for universal replication. They also acknowledge the structural barriers that remain, from funding rules to reward systems, and they cite the hashtag #PleaseDontStealMyWork, under which junior colleagues have shared testimonies of senior staff misusing their power, as evidence that accountability in research leadership is a real and urgent problem.

The deeper claim of the study is that leadership need not be embodied in a single person to be effective. Shared leadership, Riesto and Steiner argue, puts collaboration at the center even among those holding the most power, creates space for creative abrasion in the productive sense defined by organizational theorist Linda Hill rather than an abusive environment, and offers a way to join feminist theory with practice, to walk the talk. They situate their approach in the tradition of what Debra Meyerson calls tempered radicals: change that works within existing systems through values rather than outright revolution. Even within the hierarchies of the university, they conclude, shared leadership based on feminist ethics can deliver excellent research while making an impact beyond it. At a moment when academia faces funding competition, disinformation, anti-academic politics and the disruption of artificial intelligence, their experiment suggests that the power of two may be a more robust engine for knowledge than the power of one.

Subject of Research: Feminist shared leadership of university research projects, tested through a Danish architectural history case study

Article Title: Putting feminist leadership principles into practice: the transformative potential of shared research project leadership

Article References: Riesto, S., & Steiner, H. (2026). Putting feminist leadership principles into practice: the transformative potential of shared research project leadership. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1888194. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1888194

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1888194

Keywords: feminist leadership, shared leadership, research project management, higher education, academic hierarchies, architectural history, women in architecture, University of Copenhagen, organizational culture, psychological safety, power-sharing, academic careers