In this inspiring piece, Professor Louise Mullany shares her reflections on leadership, confidence, and mentorship within academia. Drawing on her own career journey, she offers honest and empowering advice for women navigating higher education and leadership roles – highlighting the importance of support networks, challenging self-doubt, and pushing forward even when you feel you don’t belong.
“One of the main ways I’ve found confidence and empowerment in my career is through mentorship. This has been at all career levels, so it’s good to view mentorship as something that continues with you as you become more senior, not just something you do when you are in junior positions. Mentorship ranges from formal programmes through to much more informal approaches – this can include finding colleagues who are generous with their time and who are committed to seeing junior staff succeed. A good mentor needs to be someone who is excellent role model. This can be a person of any gender, but it needs to be someone who you trust, who you can be completely honest with and someone who believes in you and sees your full potential.
Some of the best mentors I’ve had have been senior women who have trailblazed a path which proves that you can follow in their footsteps. That said, I’ve also had excellent mentorship from senior men in the University who have been genuinely committed to getting more diversity into senior roles. Reverse mentorship, as championed by my wonderful colleague Dr Stacy Johnson MBE, where junior colleagues mentor senior colleagues, is also an excellent way to learn about intersectionality and institutional power relationships. It is an innovative and effective way to experience mentorship as an empowerment tool.
To succeed in leadership roles, peer-to-peer support is crucial. As students and staff members, university culture can oftenfeel like we are directly competing against each other, and it is important to look beyond this. The environments where I have thrived the most are those where you have a strong group of peers who genuinely support and believe in each other. They celebrate successes, but more importantly, they are there for you when things don’t go to plan – they work together as a team, and they will pick you up and give you the confidence and self-belief to go again.
Interloper syndrome is something I’ve battled throughout my academic career and when I was a student. I’ve been a professor for 10 years, but it still occasionally hits me. Part of this is gender-based, but it is also class-based. And I’mspeaking from a position of privilege as I am white. I was a University student for 8 years at 3 different universities. My subject area of English language and linguistics is different to STEMM-based subjects, as the majority of students are women. However, I found confidence and self-belief really difficult because I had a regional accent and I was the first person in my family to go to university.
What I’ve learnt since then, sometimes the hard way, is as follows: Don’t be put off by situations where you think you don’t belong because you cannot see people who are like you or who come from the same background. Don’t feel like you are not ready for something, or that you need to wait longer until you have more experience. Push yourself. Go for it anyway. Do leadership programmes as soon as they are offered. Apply for that job – don’t feel like you have to wait until you have more experience – take the opportunity. Don’t be held back by self-doubt. Research that I have been involved in recently with University of Nottingham colleagues from science, engineering and medicine has involved rewriting job advertisements, promotions criteria and career reward systems to level the playing field for people of all genders and ethnicities, and to address bias for all other protected characteristics in the Equality Act. Such changes are not going to happen overnight, and there’s still a long, long way to go. But don’t let pre-existing systems put you off. Diversity and Inclusion remain key priority areas in UK businesses and organisations including the University sector – change for the better is happening, albeit it slowly, and you can be a part of that change.”
-Louise Mullany, Associate Professor of Sociolinguistics, University of Nottingham
A huge thank you to Professor Louise Mullany for collaborating with Her Campus UoN and sharing her insight, advice, and motivation.
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