Silent battles: intra-gender power struggles and the scorpion loop in women’s academic leadership

This study investigates the existence, manifestations, and organisational mediation of intra-gender power struggles among women leaders in Arab higher education, alongside the forms of allyship that facilitate their advancement and retention in senior roles. Guided by gendered organisations theory, intersectionality, and social capital, the research employed vignette-based semi-structured interviews with eighteen senior and mid-level female academics from diverse faculties. Thematic analysis revealed a gendered micro-political order in which intra-gender contestations are both pervasive and historically embedded. Central to these dynamics is the theorisation of the Scorpion Loop – a bidirectional cycle wherein long-standing grievances activate top-down reprisals from women in senior positions and bottom-up resistance from female colleagues, mutually reinforcing exclusion and mistrust. Strategic alliances with male leaders functioned as both protective buffers and calculated career strategies, reframing allyship as a form of gendered risk management. Distributed leadership emerged as an equity-oriented intervention capable of diluting concentrated power and disrupting rivalry cycles. Organisational cultures, shaped by hierarchical governance and socio-cultural norms, amplified both obstructive and supportive forces, constraining solidarity while enabling selective sponsorship. The findings extend scholarship beyond the queen bee paradigm, advancing a structural–relational–temporal framework for understanding women’s leadership trajectories.