Step In, Step Up - Jane A. G. Kise

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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.

      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 are often seen as challenging or threatening male archetypes of 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?

      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

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