that term. While your mind might skip to visions of the future, consider the more useful definition of prophesying as projecting what will happen based on what is happening. Thus, prophesying answers the following two prompts.
1. If things continue as they have gone in education, this is what will come to be …
2. If things change, and more women step up as school leaders, these are the possibilities that will come to be …
The four reasons we need more women in education are as follows.
1. Practically, we need to remove gender-specific leadership barriers and consider all the available talent pool.
2. Practically, we need a better balance in the mix of values that drive education decisions.
3. Prophetically, we need a new vision of school leadership.
4. Prophetically, girls, and the women we might mentor, need to see themselves as future leaders.
In the next four sections, we’ll look at research-based reasons that have prevented women from entering school leadership and illustrate the previous four reasons why education needs more female leaders. And, we’ll look at the impact that more female leaders might have on the next generation, when hopefully a Google search for leadership images will produce very different results than we described at the beginning of this chapter (page 9). The value and importance of the feminist perspective embraces equity for all, irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, race, economic status, and nationality. We still have a long way to go to reach that.
I don’t know why people are so reluctant to say they’re feminists. Maybe some women just don’t care. But how could it be any more obvious that we still live in a patriarchal world when feminism is a bad word?
—Ellen Page,
Canadian actor
An Unbiased View of Women, Who Make Up Half the Talent Pool
Why do public and private leadership globally have such a dearth of female representation? Understanding the answers to this question is crucial to ensuring we are finding qualified candidates of all genders.
In their work in schools and systems across Australia, Barbara and her partner continue to observe that women take a more circumstantial than intentional path to school leadership than men (Watterston & Watterston, 2010). Men begin to map a path toward a principalship earlier in their careers and then intentionally pursue that path. Many factors might influence these differences, from the need to balance work and family demands, devotion to classroom teaching or lack of confidence to fulfill the role, to unconscious biases in expectations of male and female leaders, workplace flexibility, or recruitment practices. Whether these are personal or systemic barriers or biases, they contribute to the percentage of women who aspire to take formal leadership roles.
In our work with women who choose to pursue educational leadership, they consistently share how they experience a far different reality than men who travel the same path. Developing as a leader is about choices. Do women have to make harder choices to unleash their leadership potential and nurture their talents and skills? Do we attempt to force female life cycles into a male career model, which will not work now nor in the future (Broderick, 2009)? Are organizations examining the policies that limit the choices women have? Are they looking for the unconscious biases that render leadership potential invisible based on gender?
These biases aren’t really disappearing. The Pursuit of Gender Equality: An Uphill Battle (OECD, 2017) highlights that OECD countries have made little progress since the 2012 OECD report Closing the Gender Gap: Act Now. Not only have women faced these same issues for decades, but progress has stagnated. Here, Maisie Holder (2017) summarizes seven key findings from the 2017 OECD report:
1. Women in OECD countries leave school with better qualifications than young men, but they are less likely to study in the higher earning STEM-related fields.
2. In every OECD country, women are still less likely than men to engage in paid work. When women do work, they are more likely to do it on a part-time basis.
3. Women continue to earn less than men. The median female worker earns almost 15% less than her male counterpart—a rate that has barely changed since 2010.
4. Gender gaps tend to increase with age, reflecting the crucial role that parenthood plays in gender equality. Much more than fatherhood, motherhood typically has sizable negative effects on workforce participation, pay and career advancement.
5. Women are underrepresented in political office, holding less than one-third of seats in lower houses of national legislatures, on average, in the OECD.
6. Countries need to invest in female leadership opportunities through for example mentoring opportunities and network supports.
7. Male role models in senior management need to drive the change in gender stereotypes and norms that continue to hamper women’s access to leadership.
Thus, practices and policies keep women from considering the leadership path. However, when women manage to reach higher and higher levels of leadership responsibility, whether in education or in other sectors, very real biases make it difficult for them to find equal footing with the men around them.
Let’s look closely at just one of the biggest dilemmas most women face (that men simply do not): the double bind. Leaders are expected to be tough, and so are men. Thus, they cannot face the double bind. Women, on the other hand, often face criticism for being too tough or too soft. The Catalyst (2007) report The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned If You Do, Doomed If You Don’t explores gender stereotypes that create predicaments for female leaders. Sponsored by IBM, it involved surveys and in-depth interviews with working women and women leaders. People evaluate female leaders against a masculine leadership style, creating perception barriers regardless of how women behave or perform. This dilemma has the potential to undermine women’s leadership. The double bind includes the following three predicaments (Catalyst, 2007).
1. Extreme perceptions: People perceive women leaders as too soft or too tough but never just right.
2. A high competence threshold: Women leaders face higher standards and lower rewards than men leaders.
3. A tendency to be seen as competent or likable: People perceive women leaders as competent or liked, but rarely both.
Almost everywhere you look, the workplace is skewed in favor of men. Women remain underrepresented in venture capital firms; music executive positions; movies, both on screen and in behind-the-scenes roles, such as director; high-profile professional athletics; and, as mentioned previously, politics. And even if successful, the lack of support and challenges founded in sexism can range from an irritation to the extreme.
Women belong in all places where decisions are being made…. It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.
—Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
U.S. Supreme Court justice
In 2012, when Australia’s first female prime minister Julia Gillard made her now famous misogyny speech in the House of Representatives, she shared a fifteen-minute riposte to the misogyny to which she had been subjected by the opposition and
