BEIRUT—Two Lebanese universities are participating in an international project that aims to transform the governance of higher education by promoting a culture of gender equality and increasing the number of women in key positions.
The three-year project, called WE4LEAD (Women’s Empowerment for Leadership and Equity in Higher Education Institutions), is co-funded by the European Union and involves a total of nine universities in Arab and other countries around the Mediterranean.
Talar Atechian, vice rector for academic affairs at one of the Lebanese institutions involved, Antonine University, says women face both personal and institutional challenges in their struggle to attain senior positions in higher education.
“Women in higher education have a personal challenge in the sense that they should work on themselves, be up to date and ready to take up opportunities for advancement in their professions,” Atechian said in an interview with Al-Fanar Media.
“Lifelong learning, continuous professional development to improve competences are prerequisites,” she said. “We should not wait for opportunities to come our way; we should go for them.”
Institutional challenges include universities’ failures to appreciate and acknowledge women’s work and capacities.
“Women in higher education have a personal challenge in the sense that they should work on themselves, be up to date and ready to take up opportunities for advancement in their professions. … We should not wait for opportunities to come our way; we should go for them.”
Talar Atechian, vice rector for academic affairs at Lebanon’s Antonine University
“Institutional willingness to enhance women’s leadership is fundamental. We need space and opportunities to move up and develop, but such opportunities do not come if there is no policy in that regard within the institution,” Atechian said.
Commitment at the Lebanese University
The Lebanese University, Lebanon’s largest and only public university, is also participating in WE4LEAD. Selim Mekdessi, dean of the university’s Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences and co-leader of the WE4LEAD coordination team, underlined the university’s commitment to making the project succeed.
“It is a dynamic project with a transformative aim that is supported by all stakeholders at the university despite all the challenges, in particular the risky country,” Mekdessi said.
“It is a dynamic project with a transformative aim that is supported by all stakeholders at the university despite all the challenges, in particular the risky country.”
Selim Mekdessi, dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences at the Lebanese University
“An essential component of the project is training the university’s decision-makers, which might encounter challenges due to pre-existing cultural views,” he added. “Nonetheless, we are confident of LU’s institutional will to implement significant changes.”
The project’s other university partners are the University of Tunis El Manar and the University of Sousse, in Tunisia; Algeria’s University of Constantine 3–Salah Boubnider and Abdelhamid Ben Badis University–Mostaganem; the Autonomous University of Madrid, in Spain; Aix-Marseille University, in France; and La Sapienza University, in Rome.
Overcoming Cultural Obstacles
Helping women advance to positions of power is an ambitious task in societies that remain largely patriarchal.
Nada Moghaizel Nasr, an emeritus dean and delegate of the rector for quality assurance and university pedagogy at Saint Joseph University of Beirut, said women have to “really prove themselves” to access high positions.
“I believe women are required to provide more evidence of their competences and qualifications than men. Moreover, they are limited by a glass ceiling which they place themselves, as many doubt their capacities and abilities to assume leadership positions,” said Moghaizel Nasr.
“They are less self-confident and more distrustful of their eligibility to assume certain positions than men, not to mention cultural obstacles inherent in our patriarchal societies,” she added.
“I believe women are required to provide more evidence of their competences and qualifications than men. Moreover, they are limited by a glass ceiling which they place themselves, as many doubt their capacities and abilities to assume leadership positions.”
Nada Moghaizel Nasr, delegate of the rector for quality assurance and university pedagogy at Saint Joseph University of Beirut
Institutional, as well as family support, are essential to enhance women in higher education, Moghaizel Nasr said. “It is very important for professional women’s advancement to be supported by men, specifically partners and husbands, in sharing the emotional and non-emotional responsibilities and load of the family, which is not the norm in our culture.”
Project Activities
The project gives universities eight work packages to carry out and outlines specific outcomes to be achieved at each stage of the journey.
Activities include a series of training sessions on various topics, including gender and leadership, recruitment and promotion without gender stereotypes, and sexual harassment.
A crucial task within the project involves setting up a “parity unit” within each institution. This entity is responsible for identifying signs of gender inequality and ensuring the establishment of a lasting culture of parity.
Huguette Abou Mrad, director of the Language Centre and WE4LEAD coordinator at Antonine University, says discrimination against women in the recruitment process is part of the problem.
Even when women are part of the recruitment process, “women often find themselves constrained by implicit gender bias rooted in social and cultural conditioning,” Abou Mrad said.
For example, “in a scenario with two candidates who had similar skills and qualifications, a panel that included women chose the male candidate,” she said.
Training recruiters to avoid being trapped by stereotypes, developing gender-equality plans to include in the university’s institutional policies, and disseminating such approaches to other universities as well as to the Lebanese Ministry of Higher Education, are among the objectives that Antonine University has set for itself under the project.
Atechian, who starts her day very early each morning so she can attend to her family before rushing off to work, observed that women in university leadership positions are on the run all the time. “To get there, we have been through many challenges and struggles and made great efforts. Once there, the big responsibilities are in themselves a big challenge.”
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