Women do succeed in higher positions in the higher education system but only to a certain point, and many women are really motivated by the traditional academic values such as passion to the discipline, pursuit of knowledge, good working environment, and flexibility. Women in higher education spend the majority of their life at the mid-career stage. Some of them feel wedged, undervalued, and find no motivation to go forward in their mid-career. Hence, the mid-career stage is very much important with women academicians, and they feel there is little support or mentoring. Hence, the mid-career period is increasingly difficult to navigate. Women encounter enormous obstacles in their academic career, including unequal task distribution and balancing caring responsibilities to name a few. The aim of this chapter is to discuss in detail the challenges and obstacles faced by women in their mid-career in higher education and a few strategies to overcome the encounters.
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People go through a number of stages as they advance in their working lives as they grow, develop, reflect, and mature in their jobs. These phases show how a person's attitudes, abilities, knowledge, and behaviors change over the course of their career and serve as either components or aspects of that person's total career (Lynn, 2002). Research shows that women in higher education generally experience consistent or similar characteristics and patterns during their career journeys. In a qualitative study, academics concluded that women's work environments did not support them in advancing their careers or becoming leaders. Several female employees talked about how they had to adjust to the “entrenched masculine culture” in a department that did not value diversity (Lepkowski, 1990). According to recent research, men and women share the same desire to develop their careers in higher education administration, but a number of obstacles impede women from reaching senior leadership positions. Relationships at work, the atmosphere, unspoken rules, initiative, and personal circumstances are all factors that can hinder a woman's success. These elements demonstrate that barriers to women's career advancement are more external than internal (Bonebright, 2012). Currently, a number of barriers prevent women from reaching parity in the workforce. Two major obstacles that prevent women from moving up and down the corporate ladder are occupational sex segregation and a workplace that is dominated by men (Kalev and Deutsch 2018). According to a recurring theme in the literature, women are most likely to go through a career “mid-life crisis” while they are in the middle of their careers. If a mid-career woman's needs are not satisfied during this time, feelings of dissatisfaction, disillusionment, and disengagement are more noticeable (Lusty, 2013; Rolls & Plauborg, 2009). According to Fessler (1995), a women's mid-career period is a crucial one but because of these emotions, women frequently wonder where their careers will go in the future.
Though, in the last 50 years, women have made enormous strides in the workplace, but the literature has also documented the low representation of women in the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) around the world (Machado-Taylor and Özkanli, 2013; Carr et al., 2015). Recruiting and sustaining women in HEIs and universities is becoming increasingly difficult (Uche et al., 2014). Current recruitment and promotion procedures must be investigated immediately in order to understand the hurdles to women's advancement and to develop plans to achieve a more equitable gender balance based on professional equality (Weiss, 201; Cook and Glass, 2014).