that resulted in our current testing and accountability environment were being made.
If women’s voices increase, might education begin to shift toward a more balanced approach? Similar shifts happened when women gained increased representation in other fields. Might schools pay more attention to gender issues and holistic considerations if more women enter educational leadership, as has happened in science and medicine when more women enter practice at the highest levels? For example, training doctors in whole-patient care—and measuring how well they do it through surveys and other tools—is becoming commonplace. Only one female need take part on a scientific study team for it to likely include analysis of sex and gender differences (Foley, 2017). Since 2016, in the United States, researchers seeking funding from the National Institute of Health must test new drugs on female as well as male animals before they go to human physical trials (Bischel, 2016). And examinations of gender and racial biases in how and when doctors provide care and manage pain have at last taken place (Foley, 2017).
How many potential solutions to the dilemmas we face in education remain hidden because the women who could formulate them haven’t been nurtured to become the leaders they are meant to become? To summarize, to get that better balance of education values, education needs diverse voices and interdependent sets of values that embody the masculine and feminine archetypes.
WORDS FROM A LEADER
One of the barriers I had to navigate as a woman leader was understanding the dynamics of male networks that have dominated decision making in my profession and that indirectly wanted to discredit my voice due to my gender. I did this by finding my voice through being clear about what my vision was and how I would address getting to it, which often was quite different than how a man went about it.
I found that being transparent and honest in my communications, dealing with the emotional content of a message as well as the factual content, was not a negative but allowed a different type of connection. I feel I was able to stand up and have an opinion, but the dynamic of “men knowing best” perpetuated due to the fact that there were so many men in positions of authority of decision making. My self-awareness and self-knowledge allowed me to stand up to bullies and bully behavior in a professional way, and not to be diminished by them. (Beth Russell, retired U.S. middle school principal, personal communication, April 17, 2018)
A New Vision of School Leadership
Prophetically, we need more women as leaders to change what people expect from leaders. We both joined the workforce in the 1980s, and we can’t forget the distinguishing fashion of the day: working women wore the “uniform” of power suits with enormous shoulder pads and rather ridiculous variations of the male tie to imitate the powerful male image of leadership and success. Yet in the 21st century, women still receive advice about acting like men at work, from how we dress to how we speak.
As mentioned in the introduction (page 1), Mary Beard (2017) points out, “We have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man” (p. 54). Let’s start creating that template with seven key themes that emphasize how women might help reshape educational leadership.
1. Organizations with a higher percentage of female leaders deliver better financial results, as do those with more diverse teams (Krivkovich, Robinson, Starikova, Valentino, & Yee, 2017). While schools have different metrics, we might see similar results with student outcomes.
2. Women possess certain qualities that will become crucial as the world’s pace of change increases. In her book Own It: The Power of Women at Work, Sallie Krawcheck (2017) lists these as risk awareness, relationship focus, holistic view of problems, long-term thinking, value of lifelong learning, and focus on meaning and purpose. Consider how school strategic plans might change if these qualities were truly valued.
3. Women’s career histories are characteristically relational. They constitute a normal part of a larger and intricate web of interconnected people, in which women tend to make career decisions in relation to their impact on others, most notably family. This weblike way of living may also explain the different way that women’s attention activates. As Sally Helgesen and Julie Johnson (2010) discuss in The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, attention incorporates what you notice, what you value, and how you connect the dots. They describe women’s attention as tending to operate like a radar, scanning the environment, picking up clues, and noticing many different things at once. Men tend to have more laserlike attention, focusing deeply on the matter at hand. Holistic leadership in schools requires using radar, not a laser, to see the impact of policies on multiple facets of the community, not just academics or discipline or other single focuses.
4. Female leaders display more characteristics associated with the transformational leadership model; through inspiration and empowerment, they act as positive role models, encouraging initiative and creativity. This would help school environments move away from carrot-and-stick approaches to motivation which have been shown ineffective (Pink, 2010).
5. Some feminine characteristics that make women more effective at stock-market trading than men may also serve schools. Peter Swan (2017) found that over a seventeen-year period, women’s more pervasive buy-low and sell-high behavior indicated that they stayed more informed than male traders. They behaved more selectively, had a calmer approach, and took more time to evaluate trades. He surmises, “A female invasion of Wall Street might not only see far more stable markets, but also a far lower likelihood of the next global financial crisis” (Swan, 2017).
6. Having more women in educational leadership may reset the leadership norm and encourage a wider variety of leadership styles. Korn Ferry (2016) has explored how varied leadership styles affect employee engagement and effectiveness perceptions. While it remains true that each person needs to develop a comfortable leadership approach that honors her or his strengths, the most effective style for any leader—male or female—is a function of the people he or she leads and the situation. High-performing leaders have access to a repertoire of leadership styles and adeptly use the right style at the right time. The Korn Ferry Institute (2016) study also finds that women create better performance-driven climates than their male counterparts, using more visionary, affiliative, participative, and coaching leadership styles.
7. Educators should consider what might happen if more women rise to the top positions in educational leadership, given what they already know about female superintendents. In researching the leadership practices of Texas female superintendents, Jessica Garrett-Staib and Amy Burkman (2015) find that female superintendents seem to have strong self-concepts in two leadership areas that have the highest effect on positive institutional leadership outcomes; they “encourage the heart” and “inspire and share vision” (p. 164). In other words, they gain buy-in for organizational vision and motivate others to join in the effort via values and inspiring purpose rather than through positional power or rewards and consequences.
Setting aside for a moment the double-bind problem women face, it is absurd to desire women to act more like men in order to become school leaders. Instead, schools need women—and men—to actively engage in redefining leadership so it includes, as research supports, both masculine and feminine values.
Throughout this book, we’ll use infinity loop diagrams, such as the one in figure 1.1 (page 28), when we emphasize both-and, not either-or, thinking about a concept or an issue. Before each value set named (for example, masculine leadership and feminine leadership in figure 1.1) is a summary
