style="font-size:15px;"> • What gets in the way
• What women can do
What Women Want
Just the United States and Australia alone have more than one hundred thousand primary and secondary schools, all of which need talented, high-performing leaders—several for each site (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018; NCES, n.d.b). Every student in every school deserves leaders who commit to ensuring incredible student outcomes by enabling teacher professional growth and engaging their school communities.
A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader; a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962),
former First Lady of the United States
This vision can become reality only if schools tap as broad a talent pool as possible and ensure that their identified future leaders have equitable access to the leadership pathways at every stage of the leadership journey. Leadership development is an ongoing process, with numerous transitional phases: preparation, onboarding, mentoring, and continuous learning. At each phase, systems need to recognize and accommodate the needs of future leaders of all genders through pathways and strategies that support and develop their unique leadership identities.
First and foremost, women want the gender of those embarking on the school leadership journey to no longer influence their willingness or success.
However, as discussed in chapter 1 (page 9), we know that in a wide variety of cultural contexts, people continue to identify leadership with maleness. Marianne Coleman, one of the world’s most significant scholars in gender and educational leadership, continuously questions the underrepresentation of women in educational leadership roles and contends that leadership is a gendered concept. In the foreword of Shaping Social Justice Leadership: Insights of Women Educators Worldwide (Lyman, Strachan, & Lazaridou, 2012), Coleman explains the currency of this thinking:
There is a widespread assumption that leaders “should be” male (Schein, 2007), and this expectation appears to hold good across continents and age groups and to a large extent is shared by both men and women. Assumptions that men are natural leaders create inbuilt barriers to women who aspire to leadership positions. Although the barriers are surmountable and are becoming more permeable, particularly in Western societies, there are still very firm expectations about the place of males and females … Gender stereotypes are particularly resilient, casting the male as generally assertive, strong, decisive, and able to see the “big picture” and the female as supportive, nurturing, and good at detail. (p. xiv)
As an educator who engages young students’ hearts and minds, consider for a moment how gender stereotyping develops and affects expectations and aspirations. Research with primary students sheds light on the young age at which students internalize these stereotypes. In 2016, Education and Employers, a nonprofit organization in England, released a two-minute video in which a class of eight-year-olds are asked to draw a surgeon, a firefighter, and a pilot. Sixty-one of the students draw men, and five draw women. The video, Redraw the Balance, which brings to life the reality of gender stereotyping in primary schools, has had more than 35 million views (Chambers, 2018). You may view the video at the Education and Employers website (www.inspiringthefuture.org/redraw-the-balance).
In order to better understand gender stereotyping, the World Economic Forum, in partnership with OECD Education and Skills, the University College London Institute of Education, and the National Association of Head Teachers, undertook the biggest survey of its kind (Chambers, 2018). It asked primary students ages seven to eleven to draw a picture of the job they want to do when they grow up. According to the survey:
More than 20,000 entries have been received and international participants include Australia, Belarus, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, Uganda and Zambia…. Analysis of the entries suggests the following:
• Gender stereotyping starts at a young age and is a global issue—it was evident in every country.
• Career aspirations are set at the age of seven and change relatively little between then and 18;
• There is a significant mismatch between the career aspirations of children and labor market demands;
• Less than 1% get to meet role models from the world of work visiting their school. (Chambers, 2018)
While these results may not surprise you, consider these gender biases’ impact on future leadership candidates. The leaders young students know and what they see, either from their parents or their friends’ parents’ jobs or the roles they see on TV or in the media, hugely influence them.
What gendered notions of roles have you observed in your students, and how do these affect their aspirations? What can you do to challenge limiting notions of gender, raise students’ aspirations, and broaden their horizons? How do you do this for yourself?
Second, women want a world where gender has no influence on whether students aspire to become educators and education leaders, or leaders in any other field.
However, more barriers loom when women assume leadership positions. As discussed in chapter 1 (page 9), they face a double bind. The world of work, and often society as a whole, critiques women with a more feminine leadership style as soft. Those with a more masculine leadership style are judged harshly for the same behaviors for which men are praised.
In the infamous Heidi versus Howard experiment at Columbia Business School, Professor Frank Flynn gave the same case study to two different groups of university business majors, changing only the name and gender of the manager (as cited in Sandberg, 2013). The students:
Rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent, which made sense since “their” accomplishments were completely identical. Yet while students respected both Heidi and Howard, Howard came across as a more appealing colleague. Heidi, on the other hand, was seen as selfish and not “the type of person you would want to hire or work for.” (Sandberg, 2013, pp. 39–40)
Third, women want a broader definition of leadership, which recognizes the values of both the archetypal male and female leaders and considers them essential and not a basis for criticizing either gender.
It seems so self-evident that schools need to promote equal leadership access, leadership aspirations for girls and boys as well as women and men, and equitable interpretations of leadership qualities and styles. Yet they have a long way to go. Let’s look more specifically at what gets in the way of equal access.
What Gets in the Way
Women may face many barriers in finding equal leadership access. Specifically, barriers that women leaders may encounter and struggle to navigate include the following.
• Gender expectations
• Barriers women themselves create
• Lack of self-care and sustainability
