Navigating the river: Experiences of women academic leaders in Vietnam

Abstract

Gender inequities in leadership positions in academia persist globally. However, there are significant variations depending on country contexts, and devising strategies to overcome these will require a thorough understanding of the country-specific barriers. While the underrepresentation of women in senior leadership positions has become a burgeoning field of inquiry in recent years, few studies have been conducted to investigate this problem in Vietnam. This qualitative research uses photo elicitation interviews and interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to bridge this gap. It examines six Vietnamese women’s lived experiences as academic leaders and argues that by analysing the metaphors they use, we can extend our understanding of the issues academic women face. In Vietnam, the metaphor of a river that constantly changes represents the careers of women in academia. The study highlights the need to equalise and progressively introduce developmental opportunities to set Vietnamese women up for success in academic leadership.

JEL Classification:

i2i23

1. Introduction

While the underrepresentation of women in senior leadership positions in higher education is a worldwide phenomenon, the situation in the Vietnamese context, specifically, is understudied. Maheshwari (2021) conducted a review of literature on women’s leadership in higher education in developed countries and in Vietnam, examining barriers and enablers from 2000 to 2019. This research showed that of all 64 articles, only 14 were conducted in Asia. There were no studies from Asia before 2010, and four out of six articles in Vietnam appeared during 2017–2018, showing the increased (but still under-researched) interest in the topic (Maheshwari, 2021).

As Tran and Nguyen (2022) point out, few qualitative studies have been conducted to date in the Vietnamese context on this topic. Such an omission is particularly concerning, given the crucial role the specific cultural context plays in reference to the enablers and barriers women face in their careers in a Confucianism culture. Vietnam retains both a matriarchal culture and folklore from pre-Confucian influences, and a Confucian influence, which has resulted in persistent informal power of women amidst a formal patriarchal hierarchy (Do and Brennan, 2015). While the field of leadership studies in the Western context has been prolific, it may be of limited practical value in a country in which cultural traditions and values differ significantly from the setting of the majority of extant literature (Simkins, 2005). This is a gap in the literature – and in transcultural dialogue – which our study addresses.

Previous studies of higher education leadership in Vietnam have tended to focus on issues specific to women, as it relates to their biological sex and/or gender. These studies range from explorations of belief systems such as Confucianism (Funnell and Dao, 2013), to the lack of structural support and the reliance on women to provide family care (Hong, 2016; Lan Thi Dang, 2017), and to personal attributes, such as women’s perceived lack of confidence (Nguyen and Simkin, 2017). While there is no doubt that these elements form an integral part of the picture, it is also necessary to establish the ways in which gender interacts with workplace issues.

In this article, we argue that, in the first instance, understanding how women see themselves and make sense of their leadership experiences is crucial if we are to solve the problem of underrepresentation of women leaders in higher education in Vietnam. This research aims to build an understanding of the lack of women in leadership positions in higher education in Vietnam by exploring how women leaders describe and make sense of their lived experiences. Using the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), we examine Vietnamese women leaders’ lived experiences in the traditionally male-dominated academia, and we generate new understandings of the enablers and barriers they face in their career progression.

2. Gender and work in Vietnam

In order to understand the academic leadership context in Vietnam, we first need to explore both the numerical representation of women, and the prevailing cultural aspects as they relate to gender roles and stereotypes. It is important to note that we are not suggesting that there is one homogeneous culture in Vietnam. Vietnam has internal diversity, which has been described as related to three geographical and sub-cultural zones; and diversity related to gender, socio-economic status and other factors (McLeod et al., 2001). However, we use common cultural issues across Vietnamese diversity as a broad frame of reference in which we situate and make sense of our analysis.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2022 ranks Vietnam 83rd out of 146 countries in the overall scores on gender gaps which benchmarks gender parity based on economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment, with 70% of its gender gaps closed to date (World Economic Forum, 2022). While the country has accomplished significant progress in closing the gap in ‘Educational Attainment’, with 98.5% of the gap now closed and gender parity achieved in tertiary enrolment rates, the figures for the subindex ‘Economic Participation and Opportunity’ signal the areas in which inequalities have been most persistent. Almost 70% of women actively participate in the labour force, and they represent 43.3% of professional and technical workers. However, there are very few women parliamentarians (30.3%), with no women in ministerial positions. There are even fewer women as legislators, senior officials or managers (25.3%), and fewer firms with women top managers (22.4%).

What about the situation in higher education in Vietnam? Recent data regarding the gender distribution in higher education leadership in Vietnam capture the lack of women in academic leadership roles. According to Tran and Nguyen (2022), men constitute 92.4% of Presidents/Rectors; 85.4% of Vice Presidents/Vice Rectors; 77.8% of Deans/Heads of Faculty or Department; and 64.5% of Vice Deans or Vice Heads of Department. Their study shows that while the acceptance of women as leaders is steadily increasing, they do not have equal opportunities compared with men, due to the perceived lack of legitimacy of women leadership and the preference towards male leaders.

Vietnamese women in academia are disadvantaged in terms of career progression to leadership roles (Maheshwari et al., 2021). First, the traditional gender stereotypes which promote the idea of male breadwinners and women as homemakers are still pervasive, and little work has been done to change these strong cultural notions. These pervasive stereotypes based on gender roles immediately limit women’s labour market participation. For example, in March 2022, the Prime Minister reiterated the need for relevant ministries and sectors to focus on implementing the National Strategy for Gender Equality 2021–2030. However, he also noted that, ‘In addition, women should be trained about raising children, organising family life, preserving and promoting national cultural identity, protecting fine customs and traditions’ (Thao, 2022). His words reflect the other two burdens that are not required for men, reproductive and community-engaging activities, and contradict his message about gender equality (Moser, 2012).

Second, Vietnamese culture continues to promote the idea that jobs are ‘for life’ and, therefore, upwards mobility is more limited (because vacancies are not created). Finally, the notions attached to the gender roles are, in and of themselves, limiting, since women traditionally are positioned behind jobs occupied by men; progressing further than their husbands in their careers would be viewed as inappropriate and cause the men embarrassment (Do and Brennan, 2015). In the following section, we examine the existing literature on women and leadership and the metaphors which shed light on different barriers for women leaders.

3. Leadership concepts and gendered barriers

Before we can examine women’s leadership in Vietnam, we first need to establish the different ways in which leadership can be understood, and the ways in which metaphors can help to advance the knowledge in this field. Denis et al. (2012: 267) argued that the role of leadership in higher education needs to be unpacked as there is now a ‘panorama of perspectives on leadership as a plural phenomenon’ (see also Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2003). The very characteristics of higher education, ‘collegiality; the desire for autonomy; individualism; a prime loyalty to the discipline rather than the employing organisation; and tensions with difficult colleagues resistant to management’, all require diverse types of leadership (Dopson et al., 2016: 222). A recent study found that as well as seeing leadership as a position, academics also considered leadership as performance, in practice or as a professional role model (Juntrasook, 2014). According to Juntrasook (2014), leadership as position covers academics who hold formal positions in their department or institution, whereas leadership as performance focuses on measurement of academic performance to demonstrate the competencies and accomplishment of the individuals. The literature on leadership as practice stresses certain aspects of professional practice in an everyday context, such as teaching, supervision and research collaboration, while the literature on leadership as a professional role model considers that anyone in the profession can be a leader by leading an exemplary life to inspire others in academia. These concepts about leadership in higher education stand out from the leadership images in current leadership literature: they show that leadership can be displayed without a formal title but through practices.

4. Metaphors and culture

In their ground-breaking book, Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) showed that metaphors appear in everyday language and thought. According to Taylor and Dewsbury (2018), metaphors help people understand and process information about abstract concepts by referring to more straightforward and concrete concepts. Alvesson and Spicer (2011) added to the contribution of conceptual metaphors by introducing different metaphors such as saints, gardeners, buddies, cyborgs, commanders and bullies to better understand leadership in the real world. The benefits of these metaphors are the contexts in which the relationships of leadership were demonstrated and also in how the problematic aspects of leadership can be seen.

A review of the literature on gender and leadership issues shows the dominance of Western metaphors and cultural concepts in international literature and dialogue. We have focused on four of these to illustrate this cultural dominance and offer an alternative generated from the lived experience of participants who contributed to our research: the Glass Ceiling, the Queen Bee, the Dragon and the Labyrinth.

A popular metaphor in the Western literature on gender and work is the Glass Ceiling, which addresses the invisible barrier(s) women face when they try to advance their career progression (Smith et al., 2012). As an indication of its prominence, we found approximately 130,000 results in Google Scholar for the search term ‘Glass Ceiling’ on 28 February 2023. The Glass Ceiling is an invisible barrier to the next and higher position. When experiencing the Glass Ceiling, women are stuck in the organisational structure because of unforeseeable challenges and barriers to career progression and advancement. While the metaphor of the Glass Ceiling is popular in the West, it is hardly used in Vietnamese culturally centred research on women and leadership.

The Queen Bee is another negative metaphor for senior women leaders in the West (Mavin, 2006) (there were 28,700 results in Google Scholar on 28 February 2023). It is a metaphor of one woman leader, a dangerous woman in leadership who will sting others if they come close to, and threaten, her high position. However, the Queen Bee metaphor is not used in Vietnamese culture as a negative image for women leaders.

Unlike the first two examples, the metaphor of a Dragon is found in both cultural traditions, but with different and significant nuances. The Dragon is found in the metaphor in Western literature of slaying the seven headed Dragon, a dangerous and career-threatening monster (Van den Brink and Benschop, 2012); (18,300 results in Google Scholar on 28 February 2023). The Vietnamese Dragon does not represent a danger or threat, the Vietnamese have always considered the Dragon as a symbol of power and nobility. Western and Vietnamese Dragons even have a different appearance. In Vietnamese culture, a Dragon is a symbol for sustaining all life and is royal in status. It is seen as the loving Dragon that brings rain, rain which is life. The Dragon is loved and worshipped. In a Vietnamese-culturally centred metaphoric forms, to slay a Dragon would be horrifying.

The Labyrinth is another familiar metaphor in the Western academic literature to describe the journey women leaders go through – navigating hidden obstacles and multiple paths (Eagly and Carli, 2012), with 50,000 results in Google Scholar on 28 February 2023. Lipton (2017) portrayed a journey through a Labyrinth, featuring characters in Greek mythology to illustrate the situation in Australian universities. In addition to the Labyrinth, one of Lipton’s (2017: 68) examples, interestingly illustrates the challenges for women academics, including a water-based metaphor: ‘Until now, she had been just trying to keep her head above the water, above the waves of lecturing, tutoring and the sea of marking, supervision, annual plans and progress reports’, which is highly relevant to the metaphors used in Vietnam.

In the current article, we aim to contribute to an international dialogue which is culturally competent, enriched by difference and affirming of transcultural depth, the metaphors that Vietnamese women use may be able to offer Western authors a broader and richer geographical metaphor.

5. Method

In order to explore how women leaders in Vietnamese higher education describe and make sense of their lived experiences, and consequently understand the lack of women in leadership positions in Vietnam, this study utilised interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and photo elicitation interviews with women leaders in the higher education sector in Vietnam. We employed IPA as an approach, process and a method (Smith et al., 2022 [2009]). Phenomenology can reveal how human experience is shaped by structures, ranging from cognition and perception, to self-consciousness, physical attentiveness and emotional responses (Smith, 2016). As Souba (2014) asserts: ‘a phenomenological inquiry into leadership does not study the properties and attributes of leaders, but rather the fundamental structures of human ‘being’ that makes it possible to be a leader in the first place’ (p. 78). As such, IPA as a research methodology creates the opportunity for the researcher to hear the participants’ voice and explore the issues important to the individuals (Shinebourne, 2011).

5.1. Participants

Participants were selected using purposive sampling so that they could offer an insight into a particular experience. Potential participants were contacted via referral from the authors’ networks. We recruited six women academics identified as leaders according to Juntrasook’ (2014) leadership framework. All the participants were recognised as leaders by performance, leaders by practice or leaders as role model, whereas three of them were also recognised as leaders by position. The interviews took place in Vietnam at a place suggested by the interviewees to ensure they were comfortable and for the purposes of building rapport. The number of participants was guided by the IPA framework: participants were selected on the basis that they could grant access to a particular perspective of the phenomena under study. That is, they ‘represent’ a perspective, rather than a population. Because IPA is an idiographic approach, concerned with understanding particular phenomena in particular contexts, IPA studies are conducted on small sample sizes (Smith et al., 2022 [2009]). The interviews were conducted in Vietnamese, and illustrated quotes were translated to English by the first author.

All participants were asked to bring 5–10 photos that represented their lived career experiences to the interviews. The main aim was to have a set of visual prompts that elicit views and answers that may not be forthcoming, using other verbal or written techniques. The purpose of this method is to ‘challenge participants, provide nuances, trigger memories, lead to new perspectives and explanations, and help to avoid researcher misinterpretation’ (Hurworth, 2004: 7).

5.2. Data analysis

The photo elicitation interviews were analysed using IPA, which requires the participants to have common characteristics to share about a particular phenomenon (Smith et al., 2022 [2009]) – in this case women leadership in Vietnamese higher education. IPA does not intend to make general claims, but rather, researchers use IPA to explore the perceptions and understandings of the participants in their specific contexts (Noon, 2018). Hefferon and Gil-Rodriguez (2011) stated that ‘fewer participants examined at great depth is always preferred to a broader, shallow and simply descriptive analysis of many individuals’ (p. 756). IPA focuses on theoretical, rather than empirical generalisation (Noon, 2018), therefore authors and readers can link the findings of IPA with their own experiences and the extant literature.

IPA as a method of analysis requires the researcher to transcribe the interviews verbatim after listening multiple times and to code every single line of text. For the current study, codes were accompanied with the fieldnotes which recorded the time and date, the feeling of the researcher before the interview, the atmosphere of the place, the emotion of both the interviewee and the interviewer, the photos used by the participants and any particular expressions used by the participants. Once sufficiently familiar with the materials, exploratory notes were taken on the language use, the ideas and specific comments made by the interviewees. These notes were then used as the basis for developing experiential statements and common themes. For each participant, we grouped these themes in Personal Experiential Themes (PET) tables. Once PETs were developed for each participant, we established the convergence and divergence of the group and put them into Group Experiential Themes (GET).

6. Results and discussion

This section describes the findings from the analysis, focusing on the research question: How do women academics make sense of their leadership experiences in Vietnam? The findings propose five GETs: ‘Becoming leaders unexpectedly’, ‘Seeing the leader as captain of the ship’, ‘Being a woman leader is to be the smallest fish’, ‘Benefitting from leadership’, and ‘Navigating the leadership river’.

All six participants were asked to put forward a metaphor to represent their leadership experiences, which were then used as code names so as to de-identify individual participants. These are: Ms Mountain; Ms Paper; Ms Rose; Ms Tree; Ms Don Quixote; and Ms Road. However, in explaining their individual challenges, without being prompted, all participants discussed their lived experiences at different stages as a journey in water – and more specifically, in a river. Conceptually, this differs significantly from the static, single challenges often utilised in the Western literature Glass Ceiling or a series of static challenges, such as the Labyrinth.

With more than 3000 km of coastal lines and more than 2000 rivers in Vietnam, it is perhaps not surprising that the Vietnamese language is full of water-related expressions and that these were found to be the commonality between the participants. The six Vietnamese leaders used and developed the connotations embedded in their metaphors of a river – the river with its ups and downs and different flow rates in a constantly shifting river. Similarly, the journeys of these women academics – while described as being in water – are all shaped differently based on the flow of river water.

6.1. GET 1: becoming leaders unexpectedly

None of the participants planned to become a leader. They also initially refused to call themselves ‘leaders’ in their current positions. The first author confirmed the leadership framework in universities to the participants (i.e. that each academic was a leader), before each agreed to join the interviews as explained by Ms Road: ‘They were in need of a woman senior leader so a woman who happened to have a PhD qualification could be lifted up from the water, it’s not because of the lengthy tenure’. This was also the experience of Ms Don Quixote. Hence, women were usually picked to become a leader when their institution was in difficulties: ‘That year was a stormy year, full of big waves and wind’ (Ms Tree). This is also noted by Ryan and Haslam (2007) when they discussed the Glass Cliff metaphor. During times of crisis, women would more often than not have been selected for leadership. In difficult times, it became the intention of the executive leaders to place women into leadership roles: Women in so-called ‘glass cliff’ positions are often not provided with the necessary resources to perform well, as they are expected to utilise their human resource skills (Ryan and Haslam, 2005, 2007). The change was so unexpected that: ‘On a beautiful day, I suddenly became the head of the department, and I had to swim, swim, swim’ (Ms Paper). Even with the highest leadership rank among the six participants, the promotion was also unplanned, ‘It’s like I was wading in a stream or a river then suddenly I was washed to the big ocean’ (Ms Rose). The promotion track was not transparent to any of the participants, but it shows how the system valued and respected women leaders when an institution is in difficulty, or at the very least, relied heavily on them during these times.

6.2. GET 2: seeing the leader as the captain of the ship

Participants saw leadership as either a man who is the captain of a ship or a woman with superpowers. According to Ms Mountain, ‘He will have to command the ship in a certain direction’. However, current male leaders were seen as unqualified because ‘their expertise is not deep enough’ (Ms Road). It was echoed by Ms Mountain who observed that: ‘They are Doctors or Professors and if they are not competent with foreign languages and computer skills, I think they are only experts in a village pond’ (Ms Mountain). In Vietnamese language, experts in the pond refer to scholars who do not engage to the broader knowledge outside the pond they are in. They acknowledged that if a woman is a leader, she must be exceptionally good: ‘Germany is a powerful water [country] and she [Angela Merkle] could lead such a country, so I think she must have superpowers’ (Ms Road). Ms Paper referred to a specific woman academic leader at her university as Aunty Green, and said, ‘If Aunty Green were our leader, we would have less difficulties, we wouldn’t have to swim by ourselves’. This sentiment resulted when Ms Green had to retire at the age of 55, taking with her all of her expertise and networks.

The language used by the interview participants reveals a lot about the gendered stereotypes in relation to working in Vietnam. When asked to visualise the leader of a university, Ms Mountain (who held the role of Deputy Head of Department) noted that he would have to command the ship in a certain direction. In Vietnam, the work roles on ships are controlled by labour law, which until 2019 only allowed men to work as the captain of a ship, and women on ships were confined to hospitality roles only, due to the notion that a job on board a ship would impact badly to their reproduction system and the child raising responsibilities of women (Tuoitrenews, 2021). As such, gender-based discrimination is still embedded into the societal structures more broadly, which in turn impacts the ways in which women are perceived as workers and as parents. Currently, women are viewed as being ‘weaker’ than men, and their main priority is to give birth; and they are discriminated against under the guise of ‘reproduction protection’ (Vietnam Law Magazine, 2022). This strengthens the belief of how societies think about the role of women and of how people within those societies internalise discrimination (Eagly and Karau, 2002).

6.3. GET 3: being a woman leader is to be the smallest fish

Overall, even though the interviewees were all accomplished at different stages of their leadership journeys, they highlighted the inability of individuals to push for significant change within their organisations. Ms Don Quixote (a former Dean of Faculty) saw herself and her fellow staff members as the ‘smallest fish in the river’, who just had to follow the directions from their male bosses without questioning it. She had also personally experienced the different expectations placed on leaders based on their gender. As the Dean, Ms Don Quixote had attempted to imitate the masculine leaders’ performance at the workplace, which subsequently backfired. As a woman, she argued, others expected her to consult with the staff more when making decisions. Her response indicates the different leadership styles that are expected of men and women, with the latter needing to utilise ‘softer’ and more collaborative approaches when leading their staff (Brescoll et al., 2018).

Participants saw themselves staying in the lowest rank of leaders: ‘We were like [the] smallest fish in the river’ (Ms Don Quixote). They noted that their presence was not enough to make an impact: ‘Subtracting or adding one person cannot make things wetter’ (Ms Road), like a single drop of water, they cannot change the situation. They always fell into the trap of doing things that they were unsure of: ‘We were uncertain, like standing at the edge of a river, one foot wet; the other foot is dry; we didn’t know what to do yet’ (Ms Paper). As they were promoted unexpectedly, they did not really know the water as they were not fully immersed in it, but when they did the job, they focused on perfection even when a deadline loomed. They admitted: ‘That’s not the way leaders do things. It took so much time but when the tide is out one must work hard and quickly, it needed to be done’.

6.4. GET 4: benefitting from leadership

One of the reasons women initially refused to take up a leadership role is because they believed the burden of responsibility is more than the benefit received. The person who stated they obtained the most benefit was the one with the highest rank as leader, and she was the only one who said she could earn enough money that she did not have to do an extra job. She said she was proud that all her money was clean, not under the table money or money obtained through corruption. She was highly aware of the problems facing women leaders, and she said: ‘I’d better not talk about it otherwise they [women] will run away from the job’. The fact that all lower ranking leaders had to do multiple jobs to survive financially was very clear. Looking at the salary and the promotion they were offered meant that they had to work harder and with more responsibility for negligible pay increases.

They also held concerns about cultural norms. In Vietnamese culture, women are expected to go home straight after work; they need to ask their family for permission to travel, and working with male colleagues is not encouraged since there could be rumours about their promiscuity. Male leaders choose men as their subordinates to avoid that rumour. Only very progressive families would allow a woman to have the benefits of promotion, as Ms Rose stated: ‘I visited all the cities and provinces in Vietnam and overseas’. The fact that she could spend that much time on travel showed that she had full support from her family, especially her husband. She revealed later that she had her own mother as the ‘chief manager’ at her home, so she could travel without worrying about her children. Ms Rose’s mother was very progressive in supporting her daughter’s career, as other mothers might be afraid of what others would say about their daughter, and they would not encourage their daughters to travel. Although Ms Rose had a housekeeper (a woman) at home to look after her children and domestic chores, she still needed her mother to supervise her home helper so she could feel secure and comfortable when she was not at home.

The other benefit Ms Rose mentioned was the networks that lasted even after the business was done. She said: ‘They were business partners at first, but after retiring and returning to their countries, they kept in contact and exchanged emails’. As a lifelong learner, she said she had gained a lot from the role models in these networks and treasured them. She had conquered all the levels of leadership from the lowest to the highest at an institution which gave her a broad view of how the institution worked. Given that she also led different international organisations, her experience broadened her understanding about her role.

The other two leaders only saw that the leadership roles brought them the expertise they needed in a fast (but painful) way, since they had to learn by doing: ‘Our university has a good training practice of throwing us to water and forcing us to learn how to swim and swim by ourselves, so I found it difficult, but at the same time, we can grow much quicker’ (Ms Paper). They also expressed that they could use the expertise they learnt in doing their jobs to earn extra money: ‘Fortunately, after many years of struggling to paddle at our university, our counselling service has gained in creditability and reputation’. Both the so-called ‘benefits’ mentioned here were in spite of the lack of role models and proper training for them to do the job better. Having to swim or paddle in a river was not only dangerous, tiring and slow, but it is a long way to catch up with figurative speedboats used by men. Ms Rose said the real benefits will only show up when you engage in a very high-ranking job, where: you get paid enough not to worry about earning extra money after work; there are travel opportunities; and the capacity to network with people who could be your collaborators or mentors at work.

6.5. GET 5: navigating the leadership river

In this GET, women described their journey in the river: this is the only GET which necessitates subthemes due to the complexity of the revelations that emerged. Four subthemes were identified: ‘The environment determines the journey’, ‘Water drags us down’, ‘Water lifts us up’ and ‘Women are the best and worst companion on the leadership river’.

6.5.1 Subtheme 5.1 the environment determines the journey

Ms Mountain summed up the theme in a succinct way: ‘smooth water or not depends on the surrounding environment’. Ms Mountain said her journey was in smooth water, signalling that it was not too much of a struggle along the way and that it was not too rocky. Although she had to tread water alone, her family – especially her parents, colleages and students – made her feel supported along the way. She was aware that the surrounding environment or the support she had (i.e. her level of financial income and childcare) helped her avoid hitting the rocks. She was aware that her daily rountine (as a water wheel running smoothly) was possible only because she was strong enough to fence off anything that could make the water wheel get stuck. She prioritised taking care of her health.

When the river seemed peaceful, they could float quite easily but their life could change in an instant. Like when Ms Tree heard the news that she would be moved to another faculty, she said: ‘I understood at that moment that a wave was coming’. A wave could mean change in the flow direction: the wave could be strong enough to wash them ashore, the wave could push them back to the place where they were just trying to get out; and the wave could push them away from their safe harbour. The wave pushed Ms Tree to a new port which seemed imcompatible, unfriendly and unprofessional at first; but then, under her leadership, it changed to a safe and joyful harbour.

The pace of life in the river was quite peaceful before they were asked to catch up with the Western world’s standards in research and publication outputs. Ms Rose described that her beginning as a leader was quite serene: ‘We weren’t pushed to International Scientific Indexing flow yet’. She was holding the role of leadership of the university’s research portfolio at that moment and more than anyone, she understood how it would impact staff. Without proper resources, such as an academic library, it was going to be another burden on the staff to achieve more in terms of output. The future possible work environment was not visible or clear, so staff – regardless of their qualifications – were hesitant to change. As Ms Don Quixote said: ‘After I finished my PhD, I had many work invitations, but I couldn’t see the water clearly enough to see whether it was clear or muddy, shallow or deep’. This form of uncertainty prevents women from moving to a new workplace.

6.5.2 Subtheme 5.2 water drags us down

The participants conceptualised their career journeys in the water, and how travelling in the water bears different challenges to a land journey. When talking about the challenges, Ms Paper said ‘I wasn’t shown how to do things. I had to swim on my own and asked other colleagues how to do it’. If the woman, Aunty Green, the founder of the department, had not had to retire at the age of 55, she would have used her experience and network to support Ms Paper in knowing the river and how to navigate it at different turns in its course. Unlike on land where you can pause a while to look at the road you are travelling, in water you cannot pause a minute to see where the water is leading to, as you are too busy steering and keeping afloat for the fear of drowning. For example, Ms Paper said ‘We are not good at selling books and to tell the truth, we have so few people, so we can’t handle it, we can’t swim there’ (Ms Paper). Ms Paper was talking about her two books that were the result of international collaboration; however, she and her staff did not have the resources to promote them overseas. If they had a ship, their books would have reached many more ports!

The work of an academic leader is full of tasks which require significant effort and energy. Ms Rose (the highest ranked leader of all participants) summed up her job as: ‘Doing university tasks is like swimming against the current’. She added that her other duties such as marking student assignments were time-consuming and challenging; she spoke of a vast workload (‘as long as a river, as vast as the sea’).

6.5.3 Subtheme 5.3 water lifts us up

Travelling in water can also have its unique advantages that enable leaders to achieve things that could be difficult to do otherwise. The first advantage is, as if the raft knows its course, a new leader just has to follow its flow. When asked how she could adapt her leadership from faculty level to a university level, Ms Rose answered:

I was fortunate to take the research portfolio when first promoted to Vice President. Back then, the research raft was more peaceful than the training raft. While the training raft had to carry so many programs, it was burdened with all the details and techniques; the research raft was lighter.

In other words, Ms Rose summed up her first role as: ‘If the flow was calm, we could follow it’. Water carries valuable information and Ms Rose created many channels to let the water run towards her. Unlike Ms Don Quixote who relied on one channel, one water source, Ms Rose created multiple flows of information both on official channels such as a university website, direct chat on the website, intranet system of the university and unofficial channels such as social media, Facebook groups and Zalo (a group chat application, like Whatsapp) to have instant access to information.

The promotion of Ms Don Quixote was a clear example of when the organisation wanted to promote anyone; they could join forces to lift that person to the position that would have usually required more tenure from the candidate. Ms Don Quixote said: ‘They (all the male bosses) were agreeable: like running water, they pushed me up’.

6.5.4 Subtheme 5.4 women are the best and worst companions on the journey

One sad revelation from the participants was how women were both the reason for them to try harder at their jobs, but at the same time, they could be their most destructive force. As Ms Mountain said: ‘If the water is not smooth, the turbulence is due to other women’. Several examples were given by Ms Mountain, such as when women internalised their role as primary caregivers and gossiped about how other women could not fulfil their caregiver roles. For instance, if the women leaders had any business trips or simply after-hour meetings, they could be condemned by mothers-in-law, aunties and women colleagues for neglecting their role in looking after the family – especially their children. They resented the power of a woman and were accustomed to taking orders only from men. It was so ingrained in women’s minds of who could be the leader that even Ms Mountain wanted to vote for a male boss, because women were thought to be so destructive.

In facing criticism, Ms Mountain said she could take it as a challenge and try to show she could overcome that criticism from a man, while if it was from a woman, she lost her will and wanted to quit. It was also a struggle for Ms Paper when making decisions: ‘For example, I can use my power to make that decision, but I’m in two minds. I struggle to decide’. She was in an all-women department, but as the Head, it was impossible for her to show her supportive side to staff – no matter how good a staff member was. She could appoint leading roles in her department, but she instead let her staff vote for her subordinates. A democratic process is not the usual process followed by a male leader, but she knew that by letting the women chose leaders for themselves, usually they would work with each other better.

A bitter experience raised by Ms Don Quixote showed that trust in ‘the sisterhood’ could be detrimental to her career. She explained that she was too naïve (as she recognised later on), and relied on information from another leader below her rank and confided in her ideas for the faculty and it did not go well. If her subordinate was a man, she might not have fallen into that disengenuous safety trap. She did not communicate widely about what she was doing and since she did not have any other substitute for communication – other than through her subordinate, so she believed what the subordinate told her. She recognised too late that ‘They rafted up to create difficulties for me’ (Ms Don Quixote). She explained that staff collaborated and took sides against her. She was constantly criticised and finally realised that she could no longer stay in that job, thus satisfying her critics, as that was the result they were looking for in pressuring her to leave her position and then her job.

The underrepresentation of women leaders in academia in Vietnam was often conceptualised as a ‘woman problem’, and interviewees such as Ms Mountain (Deputy Head of Department) argued that rather than organisational challenges, the biggest barrier to women’s progression to leadership roles was other women. In particular, she argued that women exhibit jealousy when other women rise in the organisational ranks, which made it more difficult for women leaders to communicate effectively with other women in their department.

In addition, Ms Mountain argued that gender impacted the ways in which biases operate at work. For instance, she believed that it was easier for women to challenge men’s biases (such as the claim that women are not rational and therefore cannot make decisions). She believed that exposure to such ideas made women stronger, in turn helping them overcome barriers. Conversely, since women’s objections were based on emotions, such as envy and the general dislike of seeing other women having something ‘more’ than the others, these emotions served to disempower other women. However, Ms Mountain also noted that these women-to-women relationships and behaviours were not limited to work colleagues only, since there is a strong cultural expectation that women perform the carer’s role in the family. In other words, it is not culturally acceptable for a woman to ‘live for herself’ only, which naturally impacts the ways in which many women view their work prospects.

On the contrary, a woman leader in a high rank in an institution could be the best support for women academic staff. Ms Rose with her ethic of care and her compassion for women showed that intervention at faculty levels was necessary when there was unfair treatment of staff. She showed up at a faculty meeting and prevented the unfair dismissal of a woman academic who disagreed with her woman Dean. Before doing that, Ms Rose considered all the legal aspects of the case and successfully protected the staff from unfair layoffs. She observed: ‘In all these cases, a woman in a leadership position could harmonise all these water pressures’. However, in order to do that, we have seen from our interviewees’ lived expereinces that women have to reach the highest rank to have their decision accepted.

As discussed earlier, the Queen Bee metaphor is found in the Western literature. However, the Queen Bee is mentioned in our research in a participant’s comments, but in a different and very positive light:

The Queen Bee raises the whole hive. I think it’s like a mother. Women leaders are like mothers so they care for their children and do the leadership. She leads, the worker bees do the work for her and raise the children with her. Because she is the leader, she needs to feed the whole machine, and she directs them to do the jobs.

In her use of the Queen Bee metaphor, a woman leader is someone like a mother who raises the children and directs staff to attend to work. A Queen Bee is respected because she nurtures and develops the whole organisation. This metaphor, while sharing the same term as the Queen Bee metaphor in the Western tradition, has very different and significant cultural nuances, positioning Vietnamese women’s leadership as empowering and enabling of others. In contrasting the two, we can see that the context is important in both cases, as the work setting in both cultural settings either enables or devalues women (Derks et al., 2016).

7. Authors’ reflections and summary of the use of metaphors

The river metaphor has the potential to represent many aspects of leadership in higher education, and, for example, illustrates the speed at which things can change. In the organisational context, it shows how quickly a best laid plan or strategy can be outdated and highlights the need for agile approaches to advancing gender equity at work. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is just one such example. With remote and flexible working becoming the norm for large parts of the population during the lockdowns, the organisations that fared the best were the ones that were able to quickly shift their operations into this new hybrid work model. However, as is the nature of a river, the obstacles that are encountered along the way as the water constantly ebbs and flows are also constantly shifting, and sometimes entirely unexpected.

In the COVID-19 context, the lockdowns were thought to provide a democratised landscape for dividing work and family duties when most family members were working from home. However, in the case of heterosexual, two-parent families in the Western context, for example, the traditional gender roles were further amplified at home (Bernhardt et al., 2022). Recent research has found evidence of gendered burdens in relation to frontline work, unpaid care work and community activities in Vietnam, Australia, Sri Lanka and Malaysia (McLaren et al., 2020), indicating this is not only a Western trend.

One area that became obvious through the course of the photo elicitation interviews with women leaders in Vietnam was the role of skills and training in career advancement. Most participants discussed the ways in which they were unprepared for their respective leadership roles as their promotions were sudden, as they were ‘washed from the stream to the ocean’. In contrast, their male counterparts had been given opportunities to attend leadership courses, as it was expected that they would be progressing further in their careers. Interestingly, some of the participants also highlighted that the ‘rough waters’ were an important factor in furthering their own skillsets, as they had to learn to ‘swim’ or ‘negotiate the waters’ quickly in order to succeed.

Such statements have obvious resonance with the leadership studies in the Western context, where it is often argued that women need to be more capable than men to qualify for the same roles (Maheshwari and Nayak, 2022). However, from an organisational perspective, the solution is clear: providing all people of all genders the same opportunities for training and career development would enable people to ‘go to the big ocean’ instead of being ‘stuck in the little pond’ as in the conventional phrasing of wisdom in Vietnam. In turn, this would help contradict the notion that women leaders will always have to work harder to advance in their careers, which in and of itself can act as a deterrent to move forward. We advocate for women leaders, and educational institutions, to consider the structural dimensions of their equity goals, and mobilise the resources needed to move towards gender equity.

The second related issue concerns the precarious nature of the interviewees’ lived environment. As one participant noted, she was afraid of applying for a higher role since even the tiniest change could interrupt her ‘water wheel’ (a handmade structure to lift the water above the riverbank for home and field use), and she did not feel she had the emotional, physical and financial stability to combat any potential obstacles. Demonstrating her everyday life, she showed images of herself on her motorbike, bringing her two young children home from school, while simultaneously balancing groceries on the handlebars. Of course, it is more difficult for single organisations to provide support to balance family duties and children when a society has not been set up for such structural support, and the role of cultural traditions continues to impact the ways in which people conceptualise gendered work and family roles. Mousa et al. (2021) recommend that organisations set gender equity goals, set and support mandatory actions, and support these with enforcement and reporting mechanisms. While Vietnam has set goals for women representation at all levels and fields in government, it has not yet established a process for mandatory action or reporting mechanisms (Vu, 2019).

8. Conclusion

The unexpected promotion to leadership and the mismatch between how participants in the current study see male leaders compared with how they see themselves as leaders may help organisations to understand the barriers that lead to the lack of women leaders in workplace participation. The benefits of leadership for women are rarely highlighted in the Vietnamese workplace; therefore, many women cannot see the advantage of becoming leaders. The experiences of women leaders navigating the river at different stages of their lives could help policymakers in addressing workforce equity more effectively. We believe there is scope for further studies in how the use of metaphors and local language shapes the contribution to a transcultural dialogue in management studies, one which de-centres Western knowledge, centres and re-centres other knowledge systems and contributes to a transculturally rich global dialogue.

We have shown how women academic leaders make sense of their experiences in Vietnamese higher education by providing a qualitative study which addresses a gap in the current literature. Our study mobilises metaphors as a powerful way to understand their experiences. The Western literature on leadership is full of metaphors describing challenges that women face in the workplace. However, these metaphors are not applicable outside of the Western knowledge system and have little to no relevance to a Vietnamese context. The metaphor of the river gives insight into how Vietnamese academic women described different challenges that they have in their leadership journeys. The river metaphor offers a dynamic metaphor available across all cultural traditions and global dialogue which can accommodate explorations of rapid change, unpredictability and apparent chaos, and smooth passages as well as turbulence.