How to Get the Most From These Pages
As kindred spirits and passionate educators from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Melbourne, Australia, we formed our partnership for this book after sharing the stage as keynote speakers at a Women in Education Leadership conference in Australia. We trust that our collaboration has produced a practical guide to engaging, encouraging, and supporting women on their leadership journey.
This journey includes the following.
• Finding your why—your motivation for the long haul of educational leadership
• Equipping yourself to navigate the gender-specific barriers women still face and ones that women, more than men, create for themselves
• Understanding your most effective leadership style and where you might need to adjust or develop key leadership skills (such as helping a team productively use emotions or finding your voice so you can speak up effectively when necessary)
Preparing as a leader involves an ongoing, organic process—a journey—not a one-time course or credential program. We hope this book will not just help you get started but also serve as a resource in the years ahead. Before you read on, we have a few suggestions for making the most of this book.
• Commit to a twelve-week journey: While we would find it flattering if you stayed up late reading our book, we envision readers setting aside some time each week for twelve weeks to read a chapter and respond to the chapter’s various questions and exercises.
• Find a partner, or two or three, for the journey: Consider inviting other women who already aspire to leadership as well as those who haven’t determined if it’s the right path for them. Meet virtually or in person every week or two to discuss your responses to the questions and activities at the end of each chapter.
• Keep a journal so you can revisit your thoughts: In chapter 12 (page 203), we ask that you use your reflections to identify a few ideas for your next steps. A journal of written responses will come in handy. Don’t underestimate the cognitive, creative, and emotional benefits of writing by hand—literally, the power of the pen. If you are pressed for time, use the audio memo app on your phone to record your responses.
As you begin, ponder: What does power mean to you? How does your definition help or hinder your leadership aspirations? Know that at every step in preparing these pages, we’ve strived to ensure that you will like who you become as you exercise that power.
CHAPTER
1
ENGAGING WOMEN IN SCHOOL LEADERSHIP
GUIDING QUESTIONS
• Does the gender of a leader make a difference in how he or she leads? If so, does the gender difference matter? Why or why not?
• Can you think of ways that gender has influenced your approach to leadership?
Teaching is arguably one of the world’s most important professions, as it influences students’ future. High-quality leadership comes second only to teaching in improving student learning (Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, & Anderson, 2010). After all, you’d have a hard time finding a single school where student achievement improved in the absence of talented leadership. Australia and the United States, like many countries, face the major challenge of identifying, attracting, and developing the next generation of school leaders. While yes, these countries have the separate issue of encouraging more men to embrace the teaching profession, they need to ensure that women embrace leadership as a desirable future.
Take a moment to envision school leadership. Draw a picture or diagram if you wish. Who appears in the picture? What are they doing? How might you describe your visualization? What might you categorize as more masculine or feminine? Does the picture depict effective school leadership regardless of gender? Does gender matter to the picture?
What messages do you receive subtly and not so subtly? Do the images depict equity in school leadership? Let’s turn to one of society’s go-to information sources—Google—to see how people view school leadership.
In 2018, we did an online image search for teacher. The top sixteen images that this search generated featured 70 percent female teachers and exceedingly traditional teaching methods grounded in the “chalk and talk” era of 20th century education. On the same day, an image search for principal showed the reverse of the teacher images, with 70 percent of the principals being male. Try it yourself. What images pop up? Most disturbing to us were the depictions of angry female principals in the few images the search revealed.
In this chapter, we will examine the existing gender gap in educational leadership, what gender means in leadership, masculine and feminine archetypes, and the practical and the prophetic reasons why we need new leaders, especially female leaders. As you read our case for increasing the percentage of women leaders in education, think not only about how the gender imbalances affect you but also how the image of a leader as male affects the thoughts of girls and boys, parents and community leaders, professors, and everyone else who has a stake in what happens in schools.
If you’re already convinced that more women need to step up to educational leadership, then consider this chapter a resource for facts you might need to convince others of the importance of engaging more women in the practical leadership development journey.
Gender Archetypes, Stereotypes, and Women in Leadership
Our discussions of masculinity and femininity focus not on individual men and women but on the archetypes that have evolved in Western cultures. Think of masculinity and femininity as interdependent sets of values that, over time, need each other.
The masculine lock on how people define leadership goes back centuries. Beard (2017) eloquently describes how deep-seated definitions of proper male and female roles date to at least ancient Greece. She quotes Telemachus in Homer’s The Odyssey, who tells off his mother Penelope (Odysseus’s wife) when she simply asks for a visiting bard to play a different tune for him:
Mother, go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in the household. (as quoted in Beard, 2017, p. 17)
Beard (2017) then goes on to describe how speaking in public and the words that define power also define masculinity:
We are dealing with a much more active and loaded exclusion of women from public speech—and one with a much greater impact than we usually acknowledge on our own traditions, conventions and assumptions about the voice of women. What I mean is that public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man (or at least an elite man) was to claim the right to speak. Public speaking was a—if not the—defining attribute of maleness. Or, to quote a well-known Roman slogan, the elite male citizen could be summed up as vir bonus dicendi peritus, ‘a good man, skilled in speaking’. A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman. (p. 17)
No wonder women who consider stepping up into leadership
