Female leaders driving success at the Management School
On International Women's Day, we pay tribute to the female leaders driving success at the Management School: Professor Julia Balogun and Ms Rachael Lucas.
AACSB (2023) reports that women have been gaining more representation in leadership roles in business and management schools.
However, they only comprise 31% or fewer than one-third of Deans, denoting the gender gap in higher education (HE) that still needs to be addressed.
Thus, in celebration of this year’s International Women’s Day, the School puts the limelight on its two female leaders, Professor Julia Balogun, Dean of Management School and Brett Chair in Management, and Ms Rachael Lucas, Head of Operations.
In this piece, we highlight how these two female leaders have been instrumental to the School’s transformative growth over the past two decades and how they propel the School to an upward trajectory while ‘inspiring inclusion’ in the process.
Inspiring female Dean at the helm
Professor Julia Balogun took over her role as Dean of the Management School in 2015. She has extensive leadership experience gained from her three-decade-long career in academia and profound research knowledge of strategic development, change and renewal within large corporations.
Backed by her accomplishments, erudition and firm grip on business and management, coupled with her strong leadership skills, Julia is a truly remarkable figure — one among few female Deans in UK management and business schools.
Julia has become the epitome of an empowered female leader breaking ‘glass ceilings’ in the workplace and inspiring many women in a male-dominated sector.
When asked regarding what she feels about being in a leadership position, Julia said, “I am incredibly proud to be Dean of an organisation that has achieved so much in only 20 years. We are now a triple-accredited school. We have fantastic results in terms of rankings of our programmes and student experience, and our growing international research reputation.”
Under her stewardship, the School has rapidly evolved, transforming into an international hub of diverse individuals spread across the globe.
With more than 30 undergraduate, postgraduate and executive education programmes, the School has provided almost 30,000 national and international students with industry-leading graduate portfolios, future-proofing their employability skills across six subject groups.
The steadfast commitment of a female leader
Sharing Julia’s goal of driving success at the Management School is Rachael Lucas, the Head of Operations, a role she stepped into in 2019. Rachael shares a long history and deep relationship with the School.
She first joined the University in January 2001, taking up her first post in the School in 2005.
Rachael has made an impactful contribution and borne witness to the School’s impressive evolution, from its early years when it was just trying to catch up with its peer business and management schools in the country to being ranked today alongside the best.
With Rachael overseeing the operational activities, the School has made progress in so many aspects and in ways that even she had not imagined two decades ago when it was established.
The School has grown both in numbers and size, with over 230 academic and research staff and with two new extensions housing great facilities, including a new café, large lecture theatres and a state-of-the-art Bloomberg Suite resembling a professional trading floor.
Sharing her thoughts on the School’s evolution, Rachael said, “I think we’ve surpassed everything that we talked about then. I think where we are with our research, with our programmes, with our students, with the support — everything is bigger and brighter than we imagined 21 years ago.”
Julia and Rachael’s collective efforts both contributed to a transformative two decades for the School, from a newly established School in 2002 to a triple-accredited internationally recognised research powerhouse, with 91% of its research submissions judged as World-Leading or Internationally Excellent. Today, the School ranks 12th among 108 ranked Business and Management Schools across the country*.
With the two female leaders at the top, the School has also made huge strides in terms of equality, diversity and inclusivity. In 2020, the School became one of the few business and management schools in the UK to achieve the Athena Swan Silver Award, a global framework designed to promote and transform gender equality within HE and research.
Among the School’s standout policy developments is the introduction of a “reintegration allowance” for staff returning from maternity/shared parental/adoption leave.
Additionally, the School has implemented initiatives to improve gender balance in some of its programmes, with the creation of Women in Football scholarships for applicants to the Football Industries MBA programme as the best example.
*12th place in the latest Research Excellence Framework (REF 2021) for submissions judged to be World Leading (4*) or Internationally Excellent (3*).