Leadership avoidance as a rational choice among women instructors in higher education: cross-cultural parallels

Women's reluctance to pursue formal leadership in higher education is often framed as an individual deficit rather than as a response to institutional conditions. This study reconceptualises leadership avoidance as a rational choice arising from gendered contexts that generate role stress, personal strain, and leader identity threat. It examines whether these mechanisms operate similarly across two contrasting higher education systems and whether individual and institutional resources weaken this pathway.

The study tests a mediated model linking role stress to leadership avoidance through personal strain and leader identity threat. Data were collected from matched samples of women academics in the United Kingdom (n = 236) and Pakistan (n = 229). Structural equation modelling was used to assess the proposed relationships and to examine the moderating roles of coping-capital legibility, role-congruity climate, and leader identity.

The findings show that chronic role stress increases both personal strain and leader identity threat, which in turn heighten leadership avoidance. This indirect pathway is stronger in the United Kingdom's high-performance, audit-driven environment than in Pakistan's more relationally buffered but patriarchal context. High coping-capital legibility and strong leader identity reduce the strength of this pathway.

The results suggest that leadership avoidance among women instructors is better understood as a contextually rational response to gendered institutional demands than as a failure of ambition. By extending conservation of resources theory, the study introduces coping-capital legibility as a mechanism linking individual coping resources to institutional systems of recognition. The findings highlight the importance of recognition structures and identity-supportive climates in reducing leadership avoidance across higher education contexts.