The global #MeToo movement has precipitated a reckoning with gendered, sexual, and other forms of harassment and bullying in higher education. In academia, harassment is rooted in the history of re...

Liz Jackson is Professor of Education and Head of Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong. Liz served as the President of the Philosophy of Education Society...

Felicity Haynes earned Honours degrees in English and French literature from The University of Western Australia and completed her doctorate on reason and understanding at the University of Illinoi...

Intellectual leadership indicates the informal leadership of professors based on aspects such as knowledge production and dissemination, institutional services, and public engagement. Academic freedom is considered as the overarching condition for individual academics to develop intellectual leadership. Against the backdrop of internationalisation and globalisation of higher education, academics face enormous pressures to produce measurable research outputs, deliver high-quality teaching and meet all kinds of institutional requirements. In modern universities, women scholars, as the non-traditional participants in academia, must tackle with multiple (...) obstacles and bias brought by gender intertwined with academic discipline features, higher education institutions, and sociocultural characteristics. How do women professors protect, negotiate, or strive for academic freedom? Situated in higher education in Hong Kong, this article aims to explore how epistemological norms, institutional management, and gender influence women scholars’ academic freedom. The author has analysed how sixteen established women professors in humanities and social sciences (HSS) augmented freedom using the cumulative advantage theory. The study finds that women scholars in different sub-groups within HSS had mixed views about freedom and developed diverse patterns to seek freedom for intellectual leadership. (shrink)