leadership even today!
Advice abounds on how women can gain leadership credibility by fitting into the masculine culture—how to dress; how to assume the proper postures; how to speak with a deeper, more resonant tone; and so on. However, leadership doesn’t need more of the masculine.
Research actually backs up our collective desire to add the feminine to how we lead. John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio (2013) first asked sixteen thousand people from thirteen countries around the world to classify a list of behavior traits as masculine, feminine, or neither. They then asked a different sixteen thousand people to rate how important they found the same traits to leadership. Across ages, genders, and cultures, people associated feminine traits with their image of an ideal modern leader. None of the identified masculine traits made the top ten, although two gender-neutral ones—collaboration and candidness—did (Gerzema & D’Antonio, 2013). The rest of the top ten featured traits associated with the feminine: humility, patience, empathy, trustworthiness, openness, flexibility, vulnerability, and balance.
Perhaps even more telling, the same research shows that 66 percent of adults, including 66 percent of the men polled, agree with the statement, “The world would be a better place if men thought more like women” (Gerzema & D’Antonio, 2013).
Thus, archetypes arise out of what cultures value. With this explanation, can you see how education systems seem to rely more on masculine values? For example, they overemphasize standardized, objective testing and don’t pay as much attention, especially in accountability measures, to more subjective but equally crucial data such as each student’s developmental, social, and emotional needs. Accountability systems need both, don’t they? This illustrates the essence of how we use the masculine and feminine archetypes, which we support with research, in these pages.
Leaders need to ensure that they add the feminine to the school leadership world—using both-and thinking rather than assuming that either set of values is more important than the other.
However, each person is an individual, so assuming that all people of a given gender have the same traits is stereotyping. In chapter 6 (page 99), you will have a chance to consider whether the male or female archetype is more your natural style and what that may mean for leadership development.
THINK ABOUT IT
• Offer some examples of ways people hold school leaders accountable for behaving in humble, patient, empathetic, trustworthy, open, flexible, vulnerable, and balanced ways.
• Offer some examples of opposite traits being the standard (for example, being results driven rather than flexible).
• Because what systems choose to measure often drives behavior and norms, what do your examples say about the current archetype for school leadership?
The Gender Gap in Educational Leadership
Women hold more school administrative positions than they did in the 1980s, so some might question whether schools need to pay attention to gender. Let’s look at the facts.
Consider the following snapshot of statistics across the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
• In the United States, in the 1980s, only about 25 percent of school principals were female (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). In 2017, while about 75 percent of teachers were female, a little over half of principals were male, and the percentage of male principals was higher at the secondary level (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017).
• Also in the United States, as of 2015, only about 27 percent of school superintendents were female, up from 7 percent in 1992 (American Association of School Administrators, 2015). Also, female superintendents have higher mean and median ages than male superintendents. And, they appear to make more sacrifices in their personal lives. Significantly fewer female superintendents report being married or partnered, and female superintendents also report a higher divorce rate. The data suggest the price women might pay for their career choices:
Female respondents report slightly lower satisfaction with their career choice; more than two percent more female than male respondents say they would not choose the superintendency again. (American Association of School Administrators, 2015)
• In Australia, across the three schooling sectors—(1) government, (2) Catholic, and (3) independent schools—some notable changes have occurred, from increasing to stalling and decreasing representation, from 2006 to 2018 (McKenzie, Weldon, Rowley, Murphy, & McMillan, 2014).
∘ Overall, while 57 percent of upper-secondary teachers are women, only 39 percent of principals are women. In the primary sector, 81 percent of teachers are women, while 57.5 percent of principals are women.
∘ Independent schools have the lowest proportion of women in leadership roles. In government and Catholic schools, the percentage of women in leadership, including the principalship, continues to increase.
∘ Note that while males still outnumber females in the principalship, the gap widens when you look just at leaders over age 55 and narrows for younger age cohorts—a heartening trend.
∘ In 2013, less than 10 percent of primary and secondary teachers intended to apply for a principal, deputy, or vice principal position in the next three years. Even within this small percentage, women still had lower leadership aspirations than men—the percentage comprised 24 percent men and 6 percent women at the primary level, versus 10 percent men and 6 percent women at the secondary level.
∘ Women in assistant or deputy principal roles still show less interest than men in principalships.
∘ Also, 73 percent of male teachers report having an uninterrupted career (for example, not taking unpaid leave or relinquishing positions) in schools, compared with 46 percent of female teachers.
• In the United Kingdom, 90 percent of primary school teachers are female, compared with 70 percent of principals. In secondary schools, 63 percent of teachers are female, compared with 39 percent of principals—figures that have changed very little since these data were collected for the first time in 2010. An even wider gender gap, though, exists for many cultural minorities. Further, while the gender pay gap widens with seniority, women have lower median salaries than men at all levels (Department for Education, 2017).
Across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, females compose 70 percent or more of the teaching staff—though the gender distribution of school leadership staff does not reflect the gender mix among teachers. For example:
While the proportion of male teachers in primary schools is relatively small in many countries, there is an over-representation of male principals. This suggests that male teachers tend to be promoted to principal positions more often than female teachers, although most of them are recruited from the ranks of teachers who are mostly women. (OECD, 2018, p. 402)
Web searches reveal similar statistics in many other countries. The leadership gender gap exists in education, as it does in so many other fields.
THINK ABOUT IT
Does anything surprise you about these figures? If you were
