Novel metaphor identification is proposed to think and see women's experiences in cultural context. The first academic study to investigate the value of metaphor for effect on women's progress in Arab countries. Relevant metaphor-in-use required to generate company policy and praxis towards WoB in the Arab world. An implication is for further international studies on metaphor identification for women's progress. Generalisation of these study results is limited by geographical context of this research. Themes were identified of the pipeline metaphor that explained phenomena and generated solutions to employ, retain and advance women to board directorships from higher education (“bulging”/“bursting” pipeline) through employment (“leaking” pipeline) to boardroom (“blocked” pipeline). Narratives about women's progress in Arab countries were collected from a range of sources and content was analysed to identify emergent themes about pipeline. The purpose of this conceptual paper was to investigate the contribution of the “Pipeline”, as a metaphor for building theory about Women-on-Boards (WoB) in the Arab world. – This study on women in academia is original as it is the first auto-ethnographical study on artifacts in an international institution of higher education. – Women in academia identify themselves as “outsiders” in the workplace because of the symbolic meaning they attribute to artifacts. – This paper implies that architectural, institutional and personal artifacts play an important role in defining women’s workplace identity. The implication is to replicate this auto-ethnographical study in other institutions of higher education. – The investigation is limited to one university, which limits generalizability. The theme of “affect” revealed women as uncomfortable in their surroundings “representation”, renders women invisible within the institution and women felt themselves to be under “surveillance”. – Three themes emerged on the symbolic meaning from artifacts for women in academia. – The research approach is that of auto-ethnography, whereby the authors, as researchers and participants, explore symbolic meaning from artifacts in their working environment. – The aim of this paper is to investigate the symbolic meaning attributed by women in academia to workplace artifacts.
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