Some time ago, I found myself involved in the coordination of an international academic collaboration between two European higher music education institutions. My participation was neither accidental nor unsolicited. I was acting in my professional capacity as an artist manager, representing a musician whose artistic and academic activities required coordination with several institutional departments. Over a number of weeks, I facilitated communication between the participating professionals, followed up on pending decisions, explored possible arrangements and helped maintain contact with an international colleague who was waiting for confirmation of his proposed visit. The process involved academic planning, institutional correspondence and the practical difficulties that frequently accompany international mobility programmes. At no point did I claim authority over the institution's academic decisions. On the contrary, I explicitly acknowledged that those decisions belonged to the relevant teaching staff and departments.
After this work had already been carried out, I received a communication from a woman occupying a senior institutional position informing me that the institution wished to deal directly with its teachers and international partners, without the involvement of intermediaries. The message was presented as a clarification of institutional procedure. My professional role, however, was not described as that of a manager or representative, but reduced to a category that seemed to disregard the responsibilities I had been exercising. When I expressed my concern about the terminology, I was assured that no disrespect had been intended and that the institution simply did not envisage a need for my continued participation. The distinction was apparently straightforward: the institution recognised my professional position in principle while excluding its relevance in practice.
What struck me was not the decision itself. Institutions have legitimate reasons to establish direct channels of communication with their employees and international partners, particularly when academic responsibilities and public resources are involved. What troubled me was the sequence of events and the assumptions it appeared to reveal. If the institution considered external professional involvement inappropriate, why had that position not been communicated at the beginning, before substantial coordination work had been undertaken? Why was the legitimacy of my participation being questioned only after I had helped advance the collaboration? And why did a professional relationship established at the request of the artist require justification simply because it intersected with institutional activity?
The episode became more revealing when a similar objection arose in relation to another musician I represented, this time concerning a proposed international research mobility. Once again, the institution expressed its preference for direct communication and characterised external professional involvement as unnecessary. The repetition suggested that the disagreement was not primarily about a particular project, but about the boundaries through which the institution understood its authority. In both cases, I had acted to support artists whose professional activities extended beyond the institution, and in both cases my involvement was subsequently treated as something that required correction. The experience prompted a broader reflection: what happens when institutions benefit from professional initiative while remaining reluctant to recognise the independence from which that initiative originates?
There was another dimension to the experience that I found difficult to ignore. The person communicating these decisions was a woman in a position of institutional authority. This fact did not, in itself, make the exchange misogynistic, nor would it be reasonable to assume that a disagreement between two women necessarily reflects gender prejudice. Nevertheless, it invited me to reconsider a question that has become increasingly important in discussions of equality: whether the advancement of women into leadership positions necessarily transforms the structures of power they inherit, or whether those structures can continue to reproduce themselves through the very individuals whose presence is celebrated as evidence of institutional progress.
The distinction matters because gender equality is frequently assessed through representation. The appointment of women to senior positions is understood, understandably, as an achievement in professional environments historically dominated by men. Higher music education is no exception. Yet representation and transformation are not synonymous. An institution can diversify its leadership without fundamentally reconsidering the assumptions through which authority is exercised, professional legitimacy is distributed or dissenting forms of independence are received. Women can acquire power within an established hierarchy without necessarily altering the hierarchy itself. Indeed, the conditions under which they have achieved professional recognition may sometimes encourage them to preserve the organisational practices that legitimised their advancement.
Internalised misogyny is often discussed in terms of women displaying hostility towards other women, but this interpretation risks reducing a structural phenomenon to an interpersonal conflict. More fundamentally, the concept concerns the ways in which gendered expectations and hierarchies can become incorporated into an individual's understanding of legitimacy, competence and authority. These expectations may be reproduced without conscious hostility or an explicit intention to discriminate. They can emerge through assumptions about whose professional judgment deserves recognition, which forms of independence are considered acceptable and how authority should be performed in order to be taken seriously. This does not mean that every restrictive institutional decision made by a woman is an expression of internalised misogyny. Such a conclusion would be intellectually careless. It means that the gender of those exercising power cannot, by itself, be taken as evidence that the mechanisms through which power operates have ceased to be gendered.
The organisational culture of higher music education makes this distinction particularly relevant. Conservatoires have historically developed around strongly hierarchical relationships between teachers and students, artistic masters and their successors, performers and institutional authorities. The legitimacy of musical knowledge has often been associated not only with expertise, but also with proximity to recognised figures, prestigious institutions and established traditions of artistic transmission. Although contemporary conservatoires increasingly embrace internationalisation, artistic research, interdisciplinarity and professional entrepreneurship, these developments coexist with inherited structures that may remain resistant to forms of professional independence operating beyond their immediate control.
One consequence of this tension is the difficulty some institutions experience in recognising professional identities that cannot be contained within a single organisational category. A musician may simultaneously be an artist, researcher, educator, entrepreneur and participant in several international collaborations. Their professional life does not begin and end with their institutional appointment. Likewise, an independent manager may contribute to strategic planning, artistic development, negotiation, international partnerships and the coordination of projects involving multiple organisations. These responsibilities are not equivalent to institutional decision-making, nor do they necessarily interfere with it. Yet when professional legitimacy is understood primarily through formal organisational structures, expertise developed outside those structures can be perceived as an intrusion rather than a contribution.
The word intermediary is particularly revealing in this context. There is nothing inherently offensive about the term; mediation is a legitimate professional function in numerous fields. Nevertheless, language acquires significance through the relationships and circumstances in which it is employed. When an artist manager is described exclusively as an intermediary whose presence is unnecessary, the terminology may obscure the contractual, strategic and professional responsibilities that explain their participation. It transforms a relationship of representation into an apparent obstacle between an institution and its employees. The question is not whether an institution should be obliged to include external professionals in every conversation. Clearly, it should not. The question is whether excluding their participation requires diminishing the legitimacy of the work they have already performed.
This distinction becomes especially important when institutional boundaries are communicated retrospectively. Professional collaboration depends upon a reasonable understanding of responsibilities, expectations and decision-making authority. When those boundaries remain undefined, individuals frequently assume tasks that would otherwise be delayed or left unresolved. They follow up on unanswered correspondence, coordinate calendars, clarify procedures, maintain relationships and ensure that projects continue moving forward. Such work may appear secondary when compared with the artistic or academic achievements it supports, but its practical importance becomes evident whenever it is absent. If an institution subsequently decides that this involvement should not have occurred, it must also confront the question of why the situation was allowed to develop without earlier clarification.
This brings us to the problem of invisible labour. Cultural institutions depend upon forms of organisational, administrative and relational work that rarely receive the same recognition as artistic production or academic authority. Communication, coordination, anticipation of difficulties and the maintenance of professional relationships are often treated as supporting activities rather than as areas of expertise in their own right. Yet these functions require judgment, experience and a substantial investment of time. Their invisibility does not make them less professional. On the contrary, the apparent simplicity of successful coordination frequently conceals the complexity of the work required to achieve it.
The relationship between invisible labour and gender deserves particular attention. Historically, many forms of organisational and relational responsibility have been associated with feminised expectations of care, availability and support. This does not mean that all such work is performed by women, or that its undervaluation is invariably motivated by sexism. It does, however, provide a framework for examining why certain contributions can be readily accepted as useful while remaining insufficiently recognised as professional expertise. When a woman undertakes extensive coordination to support the work of others, her contribution may be interpreted as assistance rather than as the exercise of independent professional judgment. The distinction between helping and working is not merely linguistic. It has consequences for authority, recognition and the perceived legitimacy of professional boundaries.
It is here that the question of women exercising institutional power becomes especially complex. Women who reach senior positions within historically hierarchical organisations do not enter neutral environments. They inherit established expectations about authority, loyalty, control and professional legitimacy. Their capacity to transform those expectations may be constrained by the very organisational cultures in which they are required to demonstrate competence. In some circumstances, the reproduction of institutional rigidity can become a way of affirming authority rather than questioning it. The paradox is that women who have had to negotiate historically restrictive structures may eventually participate in maintaining those structures, including when dealing with other women whose professional independence does not fit comfortably within established categories.
Yet it would be a mistake to turn this observation into another expectation that women must behave differently simply because they are women. Female leaders are not inherently more collaborative, empathetic or supportive than their male counterparts, and equality should not depend upon requiring them to demonstrate qualities that are not equally demanded of men. The issue is not whether women in authority have a special obligation to support other women. It is whether institutions claiming to value equality are prepared to examine the practices through which professional authority is exercised, regardless of the gender of those responsible. A woman can reproduce exclusionary organisational practices without those practices necessarily being motivated by misogyny. Equally, the absence of explicitly discriminatory intentions does not establish that institutional behaviour is free from inherited gendered assumptions.
The distinction between intention and consequence is central to this discussion. Institutional communication frequently relies upon the reassurance that no disrespect was intended, as though the absence of hostile intention were sufficient to resolve questions of professional recognition. Intentions matter, but they do not exhaust the meaning of an interaction. A decision may be procedurally legitimate and still be communicated in a manner that unnecessarily diminishes another professional's contribution. A boundary may be reasonable and still be established too late. An organisation may sincerely believe that it respects independent expertise while operating through practices that make such expertise difficult to recognise. These contradictions cannot be resolved exclusively through declarations of goodwill. They require an examination of what institutions actually do, how they communicate and whose labour they acknowledge.
My experience also led me to question the meaning of institutional autonomy. An institution's authority to determine its internal procedures should not be confused with an exclusive claim over the professional relationships of the people who work within it. Teachers and researchers remain independent professionals whose artistic and intellectual activities may involve collaborators, representatives and advisers beyond their employer. Recognising these relationships does not require surrendering academic responsibility. It requires distinguishing between decisions that properly belong to the institution and professional support that an individual is entitled to seek. When these spheres are treated as mutually exclusive, institutional authority risks extending beyond the legitimate organisation of its own activities into the regulation of professional relationships that it does not own.
This tension is particularly striking in institutions that actively promote international collaboration, professional development and entrepreneurship. The contemporary discourse of higher music education increasingly encourages artists to develop sustainable careers, cultivate international networks and operate across disciplinary and organisational boundaries. Yet the practical recognition of those careers can remain conditional upon compliance with institutional expectations that have not evolved to accommodate them. Independence is celebrated as an educational objective while sometimes being received with suspicion when it takes the form of actual professional representation. The contradiction is not necessarily deliberate, but it reveals the distance that can exist between institutional rhetoric and institutional practice.
The question, then, is not simply whether women support other women, or whether individual decisions can be classified as misogynistic. It is whether the structures through which authority is exercised allow professional autonomy, independent expertise and forms of labour historically regarded as secondary to receive meaningful recognition. Internalised misogyny belongs within this discussion, but it cannot serve as a convenient explanation for every experience of institutional exclusion. Its analytical value depends precisely upon the ability to distinguish gendered patterns from organisational rigidity, professional disagreement and legitimate procedural boundaries. Without that distinction, criticism risks reproducing the same simplifications it seeks to challenge.
What remains troubling is the ease with which institutions can benefit from individual initiative while distancing themselves from the professional relationships that make such initiative possible. When boundaries are established only after work has been performed, when external expertise is acknowledged abstractly but dismissed in practice, or when professional contributions are reduced to functions considered dispensable, the problem extends beyond the sensitivities of any individual involved. It concerns the relationship between institutional power and accountability. Authority should not merely determine who is permitted to participate. It should also assume responsibility for the clarity of its decisions, the consistency of its procedures and the consequences of the expectations it creates.
The advancement of women into positions of leadership remains an essential achievement, but it should not become the endpoint of institutional reflection. The deeper challenge is to examine whether the presence of different people within existing structures produces different relationships to power, or whether those structures continue to define the acceptable forms of authority, independence and professional recognition. This requires scrutiny without essentialism, criticism without presuming discriminatory intent and a willingness to recognise that structural inequalities can persist even where individual actors sincerely reject them.
Perhaps the most meaningful transformation of higher music education will not be measured solely by who occupies positions of authority, but by whether those positions are exercised with a different understanding of legitimacy. Institutions committed to equality must be capable of recognising professional expertise beyond their own hierarchies, acknowledging the labour that sustains their activities and establishing boundaries without unnecessarily diminishing those who have contributed to their work. Otherwise, the language of progress risks concealing a familiar continuity: the redistribution of authority among different individuals without a corresponding transformation of the structures through which authority is exercised.
