Invisible Institutional Work and Fragility of Gender Equity Governance: Policy Enactment Insights in Secondary Schools

Abstract

Despite formal commitments to gender equity across education systems, schools often struggle to integrate reforms into sustainable governance structures. Drawing on Institutional Theory, this study examines how gender policy enactment becomes sustained through informal institutional work rather than formal accountability mechanisms, using an instrumental qualitative case study. The research investigates how gender reform is interpreted and enacted within a large public secondary school, using semi-structured interviews and document analysis to examine the alignment among the regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutional pillars. Findings reveal strong regulative compliance but weak normative and cultural-cognitive internalization, resulting in policy-practice decoupling. In the absence of embedded leadership structures and monitoring systems, gender initiatives are sustained through discretionary and reactive labor carried by informal advocates, rendering reform agency-dependent and structurally fragile. The study contributes to Australian and international debates on equity governance by conceptualizing these actors as invisible institutional carriers who compensate for institutional fragility. It highlights the governance risks of symbolic mainstreaming and offers implications for embedding gender equity within accountability and leadership frameworks.