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

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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 in charge of your education system, what would you wish to see change the next time such statistics are generated? What actions might you take to foster progress toward those changes?

      This imbalance replicates in higher education, too. In higher education, men remain four times more likely than women to serve in the most powerful positions (Robinson, Shakeshaft, Newcomb, & Grogan, 2017). Researchers Katherine Cumings Mansfield, Anjalé Welton, Pei-Ling Lee, and Michelle D. Young (2010), who have explored the lived experiences of female educational leadership doctoral students, describe progress for gender equity as glacial. In the United States, female professors continue to earn less, obtain promotions more slowly, and struggle with heavier teaching and service loads than male professors (Mansfield et al., 2010).

      In political positions worldwide—where most education policy is formed—women hold less than one-third of the seats in the lower houses of national legislature (OECD, 2017). In 2018, the U.S. Senate had an all-time high of twenty-two female senators of one hundred total senators (Abramson, 2018). And, while a record number of women were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, they still make up less than a quarter of the House (Jordan, 2018).

       When I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court], and I say when there are nine, people are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.

       —Ruth Bader Ginsburg,

      U.S. Supreme Court justice

      In summary, every way you look at it, women have plenty of room to increase their influence regarding what happens in schools.

      Does gender really matter in good leadership, or do the qualities of good leaders transcend gender? Do we need more women in educational leadership? After all, whatever a woman’s motivations for pursuing a leadership position, neither the path nor the work is easy.

      Gender does matter. Greatly. In this section, we will explore why closing this gender gap in school leadership is absolutely vital. What does gender have to do with leadership? A whole lot if you consider trends in pop culture, research, and statistics. Trending topics and issues include the following.

      • Gender equality

      • Sexism

      • Pay parity

      • The Me Too movement, which has prompted a long-overdue focus on sexual harassment

      • The social and economic impacts of girls’ access to education worldwide

      • Stereotypes about women leaders and the discrimination they face—not just from men but also from other women

      • How to sort biological and brain-based gender differences from the gender differences that culture produces

      Not paying attention to gender’s impact on leadership has perpetuated many of these issues, the consequences of which we have only begun to comprehend and remedy. Further, it has become increasingly clear that the barriers women face actually hurt all genders. Instead of creating a binary distinction between female and male leaders, we hope to create understanding of how this distinction influences choices and how effective leadership requires drawing on the best of both.

       THINK ABOUT IT

      While the #MeToo hashtag may seem like a phenomenon that arose in 2017 from high-profile abuse cases, Tarana Burke founded the Me Too movement in 2006 to empower women, especially young and vulnerable women, through empathy. Burke (2018) states that the #MeToo conversation has expanded to focus on determining the best ways to hold perpetrators of abuse responsible and stop cycles of abuse. The Me Too movement’s growth shows that needed conversations may take a decade or more to finally grow and bear fruit.

      It’s easy to be both encouraged and discouraged, given the relatively short time we have been discussing the issue compared to how long it has been an issue; time and persistent focus are required. What changes have you observed as a result of the Me Too movement in the media, in marketing, and in your workplace? What impact has the message of the movement had on your conversations with women? With men? How does it inform discussions about gender and expectations with your students?

      Gender is not the same as sex, which describes biological and physical male and female differences. Gender, a nonbinary social construct, relates to the social and cultural behaviors we attach to people; as we discuss further in chapter 9 (page 153), it is widely acknowledged that greater variation occurs within the genders than between them. For the context of this book, we view the feminine and masculine constructions as widely as possible.

      Our interest in influencing more women to take on leadership roles took root in our first work experiences, with Jane starting out in the archetypal male world of finance and Barbara delving into research on how women’s lives differ from men’s from the start of her broad career in education and leadership.

       A Word From Barbara

      Through the lens of my Portapak (a 1978 version of a GoPro camera), I learned some visceral lessons about gender, equity, and power. During my first year in university, my eighteen-year-old self wanted to investigate and share

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