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INTRODUCTION

I

THE WHY AND HOW OF WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP JOURNEY

Women in educational leadership—What does that mean to you? Women have incredible potential to bring about change in the world of education if they step up to lead at all levels. Yet, grasping how to make the valuable contributions they envision—by influencing others, empowering others, and commanding attention with self-assurance and presence—challenges many women globally, and with whom we have had the privilege to work.

Perhaps you’re reading this because you’re ready to step up. Or, perhaps you have someone telling you, “You’d make a great teacher leader [… principal … curriculum director …].” Or, perhaps you’ve already stepped into school leadership and you’re wondering how other women navigate this terrain that men once exclusively navigated—and that still often seems colored with overtones from that era. At all these stages, we find women asking, “Do I truly wish to lead?”

If you hesitate to lead because you find the responsibilities of leadership rather daunting, take heart that women we have spoken with who are already on that journey unanimously tell us that they find the rewards worth it, especially the positive impact they have on students. If you hesitate because you wonder if you’re cut out to become a leader, know that we’ll guide you through creating a plan for your own development as a leader.

If, however, you hesitate to lead because you worry that others might see you as too ambitious, eager for control, or some other negative definition or view of power, we’d like to help you reframe that thinking right now.

Leadership and Power

We became acutely aware of women’s uneasiness with power at the 2016 Women in Education Leadership conference in Australia. To most people, leadership and power are intertwined. As we facilitated sessions at the conference, we clearly saw that many attendees connected power with abuse of power, or with ego and self-aggrandizement. Women saw having power as a negative. We heard the following comments and the same sentiments at other similar events.

• “I don’t tell anyone I’m a school principal. I don’t want to put on airs that I’m more important than others at the school.”

• “I keep my voice soft and my comments in a questioning mode. I don’t want to be seen as aggressive.”

• “No one likes a female who speaks her mind.”

Can you imagine a man saying, “No one likes a man who speaks his mind,” or “I never tell anyone I’m the school head”? We can’t, but we’ve certainly seen women regularly criticized for leading “like a man.”

With these concerns, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that women are underrepresented in positions of power. However, how can you influence people so they view women who engage in high-impact leadership behaviors—sharing ideas, adding to collective wisdom, guiding a vision, and encouraging a shared purpose—as competent, rather than … well, you’ve heard the labels! These leadership behaviors aren’t wrong; rather, people have inadequate and incomplete definitions of power.

Mary Beard (2017), professor of classics at Cambridge University, captures the problematic big picture of why women struggle to lead: “We have no template for what a powerful woman looks like, except that she looks rather like a man” (p. 54). And, she offers a solution: “If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?” (Beard, 2017, p. 83). She suggests separating power and prestige and including the collaborative power of followers in the definition. Not power over but power with sums up her message.

Power … is not an end in itself, but is an instrument that must be used toward an end.

—Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006),

first female U.S. ambassador to the United Nations

We agree that power with resonates with archetypal feminine values, such as behaving cooperatively and having empathy—those values and characteristics that, through millennia and across cultures, people have connected more with women than with men. However, striving for power with ignores the upside of positional power—the power to influence what will be done, when, in what ways, and by whom—that it can provide. Leaders, and especially women leaders, need to identify the impact they wish to have and where they might make it happen. And for women in education, this is the moral imperative of their why—for students to learn and flourish. To have an impact requires clarity of vision and courage.

What would you like to have the power to accomplish in education?

WORDS FROM A LEADER

Women have learned to turn power into empowerment. They get the urgent work done. Women know the power of collective leadership through experience and do not find power over others a satisfactory way of working. Women have learned to listen carefully, critique options, and meaningfully integrate a variety of options as they lead change—often in small, subtle, and not-so-overt ways. When women use power with and not power over, new directions emerge. Often other voices from the margins feel empowered to make decisions alongside their women leaders. The strength is that women leaders see power as multidirectional and multidimensional. They embrace co- in collaborative leadership. Co-learning, co-leading, and co-laboring are three words for us all to live by. (Dr. Lyn Sharratt, Canadian teacher, principal, superintendent, and researcher, personal communication, April 12, 2018)

The Why of This Book

Why does this book focus on women? Don’t men need to know these things too? Yes, they do. The path to effective leadership shouldn’t create a male-female dichotomy, but in many ways, the masculine path to effective leadership differs from the feminine path, with men generally taking a more direct and intentional approach to the journey. As you explore our research, theory, and practice, you will see that women face more barriers and different challenges than men. The existing gaps in gendered paths to leadership mean that talent falls through the cracks. And education needs that talent—both because it needs great leadership and because research confirms that women lead in a different way that positively influences organizational success. In this book, we’ll apply that research to what might blossom in education if it has more female leaders.

We need the best women and the best men in leadership because the impact that school leadership has on student outcomes is second only to that of teaching (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004). Schools don’t become high performing in the absence of great leadership. Thus, schools need all the great leaders they can get—yet, in a female-dominated workforce, women remain underrepresented in senior educational leadership positions.

At the heart of our why for writing this book, we dream that the gender of those embarking on the school leadership journey will someday no longer influence their willingness or success—ultimately, a world where gender has no influence on whether students aspire to become educators, education leaders, or leaders in any other field. But we simply aren’t there yet. Unconscious bias and the demands of balancing career with other commitments still prevent many women from achieving their leadership potential. In this book, we will delve into the barriers women face in the leadership journey through the ways in which they position themselves as leaders, how limiting notions of gender affect ambition and expectations, how others see women, and how women see themselves.

We need women in educational leadership with power to bring what people have historically seen as feminine wisdom to the world of education, where policies and practices have long stayed within the domain of men. We do not mean to suggest that the masculine approach is somehow wrong, but rather, that it remains incomplete without feminine wisdom contributing to more complex, nuanced, and holistic definitions of power and leadership.

We have both personally experienced gender bias. However, as we’ve listened to other women, gathered stories, and facilitated discussions around barriers that affect women who aspire to influence and lead others toward needed change, we’ve realized that we as white women face challenges that are the final, not the first, hurdle for many.

Imagine being an attorney of African American heritage who also holds a doctorate. You walk up to a registration table at a continuing education event for lawyers. The registrar barely glances at your business attire and says, “This is where the attendees check in, not the service staff, honey.” This happened to one of Jane’s colleagues, who told her, “I don’t ever get to the sexism barrier, because the racism barrier still looms too large.”

If you move in diverse circles, you’ve no doubt heard too many of these stories. We wish to acknowledge that other women face multiple barriers besides gender: racial prejudices, sexual orientation prejudices, religious prejudices, and mental health stigmas, to name just a few. We also want to acknowledge that these barriers cause pain and problems beyond those that women generally face on the path to impactful leadership.

The scope of this book simply cannot do justice to describing and supporting women in overcoming all these other barriers. As societies struggle to acknowledge—let alone confront and remedy—these prejudices, we hope that you can gain some wisdom from the school leadership journey as we describe it from a gender perspective.

The How of This Book

So, what do we want for you? As you read this book and interact with the suggested exercises and reflection activities, we want you to unleash your potential. We have included stories from our experiences and from other women—vivid accounts of their lived experiences and lessons, which they willingly shared with us with the hope of inspiring you to step into leadership. These stories, together with quotes from other successful women outside education, highlight the interconnectedness of our challenges and experiences as women and how we tacitly support, motivate, and empower each other no matter where we are. For this, we give them our heartfelt thanks.

We hope that through our research and observations on leadership, gender, and education, you’ll find guidance for reflecting on your leadership identity—and, as a result, acknowledge and energize your strengths, gifts, and talents to step up as the leader you want to be.

We also hope this book will help you embrace pursuing leadership as a way to gain power to. No doubt women are more than their gender, but gender affects the way many women view leadership opportunities (Wise, 2018). Through the generous contributions of courageous, brilliant, wise, wonderful, and capable women who have successfully transitioned to leadership, you will see that while the road is paved with highs and lows, these ups and downs are part of life. You can make your identity as a leader all-encompassing, not separate from but aligned with who you are as a woman, how you live, what you find important, and the way you engage in opportunities to grow, learn, and lead.

Chapter Overview

Each chapter begins with guiding questions. We hope that you will take a moment to reflect on these questions before delving into the content. What do you already know about the topic? What messages have you heard? What thoughts do the questions bring to mind? Think of these guiding questions as a way to frame the ideas in each chapter. For example, consider the following questions to guide your thinking about these introductory pages.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

• Why focus on women in leadership?

• How might you benefit from leadership programs designed specifically for women?

• How do perceptions of power and position affect women as they contemplate becoming school leaders?

In chapters 1 and 2, we will explore what we know about women in leadership and what keeps them from becoming leaders with power to. These chapters provide context for the heart of our why—the research, statistics, and moral imperatives that point to why we need more women in educational leadership. In the chapters that follow, perhaps you’ll find inspiration for stepping into leadership. And, you might find the answers you need when others ask, “Can’t we set gender aside and just seek the best leaders?”

Chapter 3 guides you in finding time to undertake this important leadership journey, and in chapter 4, you’ll realize why the leadership journey could have value for you. In chapters 5–8, you will examine your strengths, skills, and beliefs, identifying how to use them to become the leader you wish to be. Chapters 9–11 provide grounding in communicating as a female leader, having hard conversations, proactively seeking out opportunities for inspiration and support, and helping other women develop these crucial ways of leading. Finally, in chapter 12, you’ll pull it all together in a plan for continuing this journey. The end of every chapter offers a Step in for Further Reflection section. You may use these activities to reflect on the ideas, strategies, and concepts presented in each chapter.

This isn’t a book on instructional leadership skills, although working with the practical tools in chapters 3–10 may improve your capacity to foster teachers’ professional growth. It also isn’t a book on improving visioning or strategizing or using data to inform decisions—although you may gain new understandings of your strengths and challenges and what to do about them regarding these leadership responsibilities. Instead, these pages are about your own development into the wisest leader you can be, embracing the unique contributions that the feminine brings to personal leadership development and to education as a whole.

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.