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In today's universities, women are still underrepresented in senior leadership positions. The research-focused systems and structures that support the progression of men often work against women who are drawn to alternative career paths within the academy for a variety of reasons. UK universities have seen an increase in teaching-focused career paths as well as ‘Third Space’ roles, which navigate an increasing space between purely professional and purely academic jobs. Since 2018, four research-intensive universities in the UK have appointed women to the position of PVC Education who have come from Third Space, academic development backgrounds. This paper explores their career paths and experiences and identifies that they have had to constantly navigate between professional and academic contracts in order to negotiate their own progression, thus creating their own space in which they are able to advance. The paper considers whether women in the Third Space end up trapped in a ‘glass classroom’ or whether a more fundamental political and transformational act in gender and Third Space career progression is emerging.

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This paper explores the state of leadership in UK universities in the face of external pressures and turmoil, and makes the case for a new model of leadership constructed of a 'golden braid' of three threads of courage, compassion and resilience. Each thread is discussed with the intention of developing a framework that can be used to support leadership development to lead our universities effectively through the current chaos. Even before Covid-19 hit the world, UK higher education was perceived as being in a state of huge flux and chaos: the "old order" of a traditionally male-dominated elitist system funded by central government (O'Connor, 2015), has been dismantled and replaced with mass participation and student fees leading to an increase in marketization and government regulation for which academic leadership is generally under-prepared (Deem, 2004;Flückiger, Y. 2021). As such, this is the crucial time for us to embark upon a sectorwide discussion of what we want our universities to look like in this post-pandemic period -how we want to be teaching, researching and working and what we want the core values to be. In this paper, I suggest that the 'values' we had before will no longer be the ones we want to take forwards. For this, therefore, we need the 'golden braid' of courage, compassion and resilience in leadership discussed herewith.

In higher education institutions, as in other organisations, the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly affected the ways in which individuals work and resulted in the loss of pre-existing boundaries between work life and domestic life. UK universities are a multi-billion pound-sterling contributor to the UK economy and in 2020 the sectorrepresentative body, Universities UK, made a request to the UK government for £2.2 billion to help to mitigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. In spite of the dramatic impact on the lives of university staff, however, there has been little attempt made in the existing literature to try to understand their experiences, motivations and actions of working in academia through this unprecedented time. This paper reports the emerging findings of an initial tranche of interviews with 28 individuals working across 23 different UK universities and uses an institutional logics perspective to understand their experiences in the context of what was happening at the time. The findings indicate the continued importance of market, professional and managerialism logics but highlights the dominance of a hitherto-unidentified logic, the 'students first' logic. The findings also demonstrate the ways in which individuals negotiated the competing logics of family and professional and meshed them together in a unique covid-specific hybrid and identifies a complex interplay of the logics.