No Woman is Like a Man (in Academia): The Masculine Symbolic Order and the Unwanted Female Body

Women continue to be under-represented in senior positions in universities and their relative absence from the top jobs in management and business schools remains a cause for concern. The aim of this study is to extend understanding of this situation by drawing on the feminist psychoanalytical post-structuralist theories of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. The theoretical frame proposed engages with debates over language, discourse and the body and allows development of a theory of the disembodied symbolic order explaining women’s continued marginalization and devaluation in academe. This is achieved through analysis of empirical findings of the experiences of women faculty in nine management and business schools in England. The study demonstrates how male norms and woman’s absence from symbolic representations disables their participation in equivalent terms in the institutions studied, and how women often both collude with and resist their own marginalization in academia.