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2
NAVIGATING GENDER BARRIERS
GUIDING QUESTIONS
• What key roles and responsibilities do you see yourself having as an educational leader?
• How will you shine as a leader?
• Do you have any doubts about your leadership potential that resemble the barriers revealed by research on women in leadership? What are they?
We included the word journey in the title of this book for a reason: just as no teacher arrives in a classroom with all the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind that highly effective instruction requires, no one enters into school leadership with all the skills, experience, and confidence one needs to lead in a highly effective way. But becoming a leader isn’t exactly smooth sailing, especially for women. Understanding what you might encounter—the winds and waves of gender barriers as well as the complexity of the work—will help you build the resilience and the skills you need to ensure the wind stays at your back and the waves don’t swamp you.
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
—Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888),
American author
We offer these brief descriptions of our own first steps on the school leadership journey.
A Word From Barbara
In the mid-1990s, a school district in midwestern Australia approached me to apply for an interim principalship of a small, rural school. My children were then three and five years old, and my husband’s work at that time involved extensive travel. Relocating would have been a big decision even without the demands of the role and the expectations of a conservative farming community where most of my colleagues were males who had wives to support them in raising their young families. Yes, I was a capable teacher, and I had some leadership experience, but I was short on confidence to lead a school, even a small one. When the school hired me, I felt it dragged me to the role kicking and screaming, “I’m not ready. I need experience. They’re going to find out I’m an impostor.”
In hindsight, I know I fell into the trap, like so many other women, of assuming I had to have at least 80 percent of the skills and experience required before even trying for a position—counterintuitive given that you can’t get the experience unless you seek the opportunities, step up, and lead!
A Word From Jane
I found myself in an educational leadership doctoral program, spurred on by my husband, who said, “You’re already doing the research. Get the degree so that it is recognized.” This wasn’t an obvious career path; I have an MBA in finance and still do quite a bit of corporate consulting. But a school principal (with whom I eventually coauthored two books) had invited me to apply my executive-coaching skills to working with her staff years before instructional coaching grew into a hot topic. I paid my dues working side by side with the teachers in her school, helping them differentiate instruction as student demographics and curriculum demands went through rapid changes.
Soon, through word of mouth, school leaders called me in for coaching, conflict resolution, and other professional development; I took a partnership approach with school leaders across the United States and in other countries. When I look back, it amazes me how I developed as an educational leader in an organic, not planned way, as many, many women do.
Both of us could add to our stories, listing barriers we encountered or sometimes created ourselves. Hopefully, you’ve reflected on the guiding questions at the beginning of this chapter so you can compare the thoughts you have about becoming a leader with the difficulties other women have navigated.
Leadership barriers take many forms, from unconscious biases about looks or attire to blatant sexism around maintaining traditional patriarchal leadership expectations. Conversations with female educators have shown us that many cannot adeptly recognize these barriers, including those they create on their own. Instead, they often believe they themselves are the problem in need of a solution. We’ve observed that women underestimate their capacity for school leadership. Often, women have inaccurately high notions of the skills and experience that leadership requires, or they lack confidence and thus struggle to articulate their accomplishments or career aspirations.
Barbara’s experiences guided her into research focused not only on women and leadership but also on championing school leadership development and professional learning more broadly. Recognition, recruitment, development, induction, transition, and ongoing renewal are essential, not just nice to have, to ensure that every school has high-quality and well-supported education leaders. To highlight the changes needed in each of these areas if women are to step in and step up, and to help you prepare to navigate the gender barriers in school leadership, consider the following.
• What women want
• What gets in the way
• What women can do
What Women Want
Just the United States and Australia alone have more than one hundred thousand primary and secondary schools, all of which need talented, high-performing leaders—several for each site (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018; NCES, n.d.b). Every student in every school deserves leaders who commit to ensuring incredible student outcomes by enabling teacher professional growth and engaging their school communities.
A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader; a great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962),
former First Lady of the United States
This vision can become reality only if schools tap as broad a talent pool as possible and ensure that their identified future leaders have equitable access to the leadership pathways at every stage of the leadership journey. Leadership development is an ongoing process, with numerous transitional phases: preparation, onboarding, mentoring, and continuous learning. At each phase, systems need to recognize and accommodate the needs of future leaders of all genders through pathways and strategies that support and develop their unique leadership identities.
First and foremost, women want the gender of those embarking on the school leadership journey to no longer influence their willingness or success.
However, as discussed in chapter 1 (page 9), we know that in a wide variety of cultural contexts, people continue to identify leadership with maleness. Marianne Coleman, one of the world’s most significant scholars in gender and educational leadership, continuously questions the underrepresentation of women in educational leadership roles and contends that leadership is a gendered concept. In the foreword of Shaping Social Justice Leadership: Insights of Women Educators Worldwide (Lyman, Strachan, & Lazaridou, 2012), Coleman explains the currency of this thinking:
There is a widespread assumption that leaders “should be” male (Schein, 2007), and this expectation appears to hold good across continents and age groups and to a large extent is shared by both men and women. Assumptions that men are natural leaders create inbuilt barriers to women who aspire to leadership positions. Although the barriers are surmountable and are becoming more permeable, particularly in Western societies, there are still very firm expectations about the place of males and females … Gender stereotypes are particularly resilient, casting the male as generally assertive, strong, decisive, and able to see the “big picture” and the female as supportive, nurturing, and good at detail. (p. xiv)
As an educator who engages young students’ hearts and minds, consider for a moment how gender stereotyping develops and affects expectations and aspirations. Research with primary students sheds light on the young age at which students internalize these stereotypes. In 2016, Education and Employers, a nonprofit organization in England, released a two-minute video in which a class of eight-year-olds are asked to draw a surgeon, a firefighter, and a pilot. Sixty-one of the students draw men, and five draw women. The video, Redraw the Balance, which brings to life the reality of gender stereotyping in primary schools, has had more than 35 million views (Chambers, 2018). You may view the video at the Education and Employers website (www.inspiringthefuture.org/redraw-the-balance).
In order to better understand gender stereotyping, the World Economic Forum, in partnership with OECD Education and Skills, the University College London Institute of Education, and the National Association of Head Teachers, undertook the biggest survey of its kind (Chambers, 2018). It asked primary students ages seven to eleven to draw a picture of the job they want to do when they grow up. According to the survey:
More than 20,000 entries have been received and international participants include Australia, Belarus, Bangladesh, China, Colombia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, Uganda and Zambia…. Analysis of the entries suggests the following:
• Gender stereotyping starts at a young age and is a global issue—it was evident in every country.
• Career aspirations are set at the age of seven and change relatively little between then and 18;
• There is a significant mismatch between the career aspirations of children and labor market demands;
• Less than 1% get to meet role models from the world of work visiting their school. (Chambers, 2018)
While these results may not surprise you, consider these gender biases’ impact on future leadership candidates. The leaders young students know and what they see, either from their parents or their friends’ parents’ jobs or the roles they see on TV or in the media, hugely influence them.
What gendered notions of roles have you observed in your students, and how do these affect their aspirations? What can you do to challenge limiting notions of gender, raise students’ aspirations, and broaden their horizons? How do you do this for yourself?
Second, women want a world where gender has no influence on whether students aspire to become educators and education leaders, or leaders in any other field.
However, more barriers loom when women assume leadership positions. As discussed in chapter 1 (page 9), they face a double bind. The world of work, and often society as a whole, critiques women with a more feminine leadership style as soft. Those with a more masculine leadership style are judged harshly for the same behaviors for which men are praised.
In the infamous Heidi versus Howard experiment at Columbia Business School, Professor Frank Flynn gave the same case study to two different groups of university business majors, changing only the name and gender of the manager (as cited in Sandberg, 2013). The students:
Rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent, which made sense since “their” accomplishments were completely identical. Yet while students respected both Heidi and Howard, Howard came across as a more appealing colleague. Heidi, on the other hand, was seen as selfish and not “the type of person you would want to hire or work for.” (Sandberg, 2013, pp. 39–40)
Third, women want a broader definition of leadership, which recognizes the values of both the archetypal male and female leaders and considers them essential and not a basis for criticizing either gender.
It seems so self-evident that schools need to promote equal leadership access, leadership aspirations for girls and boys as well as women and men, and equitable interpretations of leadership qualities and styles. Yet they have a long way to go. Let’s look more specifically at what gets in the way of equal access.
What Gets in the Way
Women may face many barriers in finding equal leadership access. Specifically, barriers that women leaders may encounter and struggle to navigate include the following.
• Gender expectations
• Barriers women themselves create
• Lack of self-care and sustainability
WORDS FROM A LEADER
One of the barriers I had to navigate as a woman leader was the culture, beliefs, and practices that failed to recognize the leadership potential of women. I did this by doing my best work every day, building communities with other women, and demonstrating through results that women not only are capable of leadership, but when they are in leadership roles, the cultures of the communities in which they work are more humane, loving, and personal. (Joellen Killion, senior advisor, Learning Forward, personal communication, April 19, 2018)
Gender Expectations
Gender stereotyping, which arises from the expectations societies place on people based on their apparent gender, is a form of unconscious bias. Unconscious bias happens subconsciously based on people’s personal, environmental, and cultural experiences. People make judgments and assumptions in a nanosecond, grounded in their beliefs rather than in facts.
As discussed in chapter 1 (page 9), gender construction is the meaning that people in a given group, culture, or society attach to being biologically male or female, actively built from possible traits and behaviors. Here are a few of the gendered expectations that women must navigate.
Unconscious Bias Creeps Into Hiring Practices
Gender stereotyping lies at the heart of the conversation on women in leadership at any level. In the work world, we observe unconscious bias in recruitment and promotion processes, work allocation, treatment of staff, and performance appraisals.
In an extensive literature review of women in educational leadership, Anthony Thorpe (2016) explores not only the representation of women in leadership structures but also where these structures represent women and how leadership is exercised. Not only do schools need to increase the number of women in leadership positions but also address deeper problems. Women appear to have positions of limited power or prestige. Further, “those positions defined as powerful, responsible, and prestigious are more likely to exclude care and less likely to be held by women” (Thorpe, 2016, p. 17).
And think about the impact of the wage gap: women need at least one more degree than men in order to earn the same salary as men do (Carnevale, Smith, & Gulish, 2018).
Teachers Have Unconscious Expectations of Male and Female Principals
Some teachers, particularly men, expect female principals to exhibit taking care behaviors rather than taking charge behaviors—behaviors they were unlikely to expect from male principals. Jo, an Australian principal, has called these cases “‘I’m not your mum’ moments.”
Similarly, Jim Watterston (2018) observed that a large Australian school district anticipated that female leaders would have higher scores than their male counterparts in the areas of supportive leadership and school morale because of their more caring, relationship-oriented leadership style. The district found just the opposite; feedback for female leaders demonstrated lower ratings for supportive leadership and staff morale. With women composing more than 75 percent of the district’s teachers, a number of theories might explain this. Perhaps female teachers have different and more critical expectations of female principals. Or, female principals may adopt a more dominant or masculine leadership style, believing that teachers expect this of school leaders. Whatever the explanation, it highlights an additional complexity and challenge that has implications for leadership development programs.
In chapter 6 (page 99), we’ll explore moving away from stereotypes and toward leadership archetypes. This involves articulating a group’s values while still acknowledging individual differences and then naming the genders’ positive archetypal values.
THINK ABOUT IT
Consider for a moment whether you have different expectations for male and female leaders. Make one list of leaders you admire and one list of leaders you disliked working for or with. Jot down a few notes as to why people made each list. What do you notice?
Women Are Less Likely Than Men to Plan Careers
Since the late 1990s, in our conversations with teachers, we have observed that while young male teachers eagerly seek career advancement, even actively planning their journey to the top, their female counterparts approach it less proactively. Further, many female principals only think about a leadership role when someone else suggests it or they are required to fill in for a short period and they find that they enjoy the role.
Traditionally, women face more difficulties in planning careers, because in one way or another, they need to deal with the expectations that they will take the lead in rearing children and managing family affairs (including caring for elderly parents and running a household). Women tend to put others before themselves in making career-progression decisions. Further, planning for career moves has stayed more part of male culture than female culture.
Women encounter more disruptions throughout their careers, including, as termed by the Global City Leaders Project, “the nexus of big jobs, small kids” (Spiller, 2017, p. 7). Even when women have opportunities open to them, given these complexities and connectedness to roles they play outside of their work life, those that require relocation often involve tougher decisions than men face because of family dynamics and societal expectations. Both men and women make difficult decisions when relocating, but women experience these challenges differently, as they take a weblike view of the impact and disruption on family life, including responsibility for a greater share of domestic circumstances.
THINK ABOUT IT
Explicit and subconscious messages about gender bombard people daily. Search YouTube (www.youtube.com) for the following videos.
• 48 Things Women Hear in a Lifetime (That Men Just Don’t) (HuffPost, 2015b)
• 48 Things Men Hear in a Lifetime (That Are Bad for Everyone) (HuffPost, 2015a)
What gender biases can you identify? Before you watch the first video, consider three messages women receive that men don’t. Were your points reflected in the video? After watching both videos, write down how you feel—what surprised you, challenged you, or resonated with you? What is one thing that you can do as an educator to address the issues raised?
Women May Judge Each Other Harshly
Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (2016) coined a well-known phrase when she was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and worked closely with the six other female UN ambassadors: “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” Situations that demonstrate women’s inhumanity to women include, for example, when those who have succeeded in climbing the ladder of success pull up the ladder because they feel that they toughed it out and thus others should too.
When you’ve worked hard, and done well, and walked through the doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you. You reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed.
—Michelle Obama,
former First Lady of the United States
Australian writer, presenter, and commentator Jamila Rizvi (2017) says it’s because women’s expectations of how they should treat one another are much higher than how they expect to be treated by men:
One 2008 study found that women who were working under female supervisors reported more systems of physical and physiological stress than did those working under male supervisors. I can’t help but wonder if that was because the men supervisors were more supportive, or whether it was because when women supervisors were less than supportive, it came as more of a shock. We expect better treatment from other women at work. (p. 255)
Albright (2016) firmly believes that “women have an obligation to help one another. In a society where women often feel pressured to tear one another down, our saving grace lies in our willingness to lift one another up.”
Barriers Women Create Themselves
Another set of barriers involves women’s own thoughts and actions. In chapter 7 (page 115), you’ll have a chance to get specific about your own possible high-flying and limiting beliefs, and how you can address them, but some common ones follow.
Women Don’t Know If They Are Ready to Lead
This phenomenon intrigued Jim Watterston, an educator and system leader, as he observed his career trajectory and those of teachers around him (as cited in Tarica, 2010). He took a particular interest in the stories of women who did and didn’t become education leaders. It struck him that women in particular often talked of the same fraught path—they lacked confidence and had a nagging uncertainty about whether they were ready to lead. Those who did become principals shared the obstacles they had to overcome, including their own perceived lack of readiness. Watterston makes the point that overcoming obstacles is not about changing women but about changing the culture, including creating very explicit and diverse ways to engage women in leadership development opportunities (as cited in Tarica, 2010).
Women Assume They Need to Possess All Leadership Skills Before Applying
Part of women’s reluctance to step up stems from a belief that leaders come fully prepared to lead, which may stem from misplaced ideas of perfection. Consider key research on happiness (Ben-Shahar, 2009). Are you a perfectionist who assumes that anything short of perfection represents failure? Or are you more of an optimalist who assumes that you will continue to learn and you need to understand and use the concept of good enough? Which describes how you think about the school leadership journey? See table 2.1 for a comparison.
Table 2.1: Comparing Perfectionists and Optimalists
| Perfectionist | Optimalist |
| Journey as a straight line | Journey as an irregular spiral |
| Fear of failure | Failure as feedback |
| Focus on destination | Focus on journey and destination |
| All-or-nothing thinking | Nuanced, complex thinking |
| Defensive | Open to suggestions |
| Faultfinder | Benefit finder |
| Harsh | Forgiving |
| Rigid, static | Adaptable, dynamic |
Source: Ben-Shahar, 2009, p. 18.
Women Equate Leadership With an Undesirable Definition of Power
During your reflective journey with this book, we want to ensure that you see school leadership as power to and not power over, as we described in the introduction (page 1). We demonstrate how we engage and influence outcomes in the multidimensional and collaborative nature of our work in education—working with and through others to influence and inspire them. You’ll have a chance to deepen your understanding of the beauty of leading with the right kind of power throughout these pages.
Women See the “Real” Work of Education as Direct Contact With Students
The motto, “We’re in it for the children,” serves women in education well but can also keep them from stepping forward or speaking up. Most teachers crave working with school principals and other leaders who truly understand what they face in the classroom, which means schools must have teachers as a core source for the leadership pipeline. Yes, many will have a calling to stay in the classroom, but is this your calling?
What I know now is that gender equality or diversity work is action orientated. It is lived and practiced through our daily actions and interactions. In what is spoken and what is said without words. Culture, or normalized common-sense ways of behaving and believing is perhaps the most obvious obstacle and source of existential tension for women seeking and maintaining powerful positions.
—Rachel Dickinson,
assistant dean, Warwick Business School, Coventry, England
Women Fear Receiving More Intense Scrutiny and Criticism Than Men
You might call this the “Do I have thick enough skin to become a leader?” barrier. And the caution may be warranted. Perhaps through this journey, you’ll find women with whom you can band together to tackle some suggestions in the What Women Can Do section (page 44).
Lack of Self-Care and Sustainability
In conversations with numerous female teachers, we learned that some women consider leadership only after their own children have grown more independent, because for them, career advancement and ambition don’t sit comfortably with support of family well-being. Work-life balance presents a challenge for everyone, and the demands and stress of the role of principal can significantly impact well-being. A contributing factor that deters women from seeking principalships is that they see it as a less attractive option if the role impacts their personal well-being and life balance.
Numerous longitudinal principal health and well-being surveys indicate that principals have experienced increasing stress levels; these surveys recommend individual-, association-, and system-level implementation strategies to address and alleviate this stress (Pollack, 2017; Riley, 2017). However, these surveys also note that principals have high levels of satisfaction with the role. Inarguably, a principal’s role has become more complex, now demanding skills as diverse as those needed to run a business. However, unlike CEOs who might be physically disconnected from their clients, principals have a constant and visible connection to clients, the students, and this familiarity brings joys and difficulties. Despite all the challenges, the statistics speak for themselves—in Australia, for example, 96 percent of principals would choose the role again if given the chance (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL], 2016).
Fundamentally, well-being and sustainability in leadership requires work-life balance, and for women in particular, this creates a weblike phenomenon. Women cannot isolate their work experience from their broader experiences of self and their everyday lives. They need to sustain and take care of themselves first; giving themselves permission to do so affects their productivity, impact, and influence. We will explore this focus further in chapter 3 (page 51). Women leaders’ self-care is also crucial because it affects whether the leaders act as positive models and advocates for the role, influencing whether other women view leadership as feasible for them.
What Women Can Do
In chapter 1 (page 9), we discussed the need to address the readiness gap, support current school leaders, and make leadership roles an attractive option for future leaders. In a female-dominated workforce, identifying and developing the next generation of school leaders also requires encouraging talented women to consider and take on these roles.
Educator Jill Blackmore (2006) suggests that when choosing school leaders, systems need to promote multiple representations of and diverse approaches to leadership. This also promotes wider cultural and ethnic diversity and challenges the generally masculine representations of leadership. Such suggestions can address multiple barriers. For example, potential leaders may exit and re-enter the education workforce for a variety of reasons; multiple leadership models point out the diversity such candidates can bring to schools. Multiple models and leadership approaches include co-principalship, distributed pedagogical leadership, shared principalship, multi-campus principalship, and community-based principalship (Blackmore, 2006).
Schools and districts can support aspiring leaders to gain experience by offering work shadowing and internship opportunities or having them take leadership of specific projects or programs to flex their leadership skills and gain the experience they require. Given the feedback women have shared with us about not feeling good enough, having enough experience, or being 100 percent perfect, these are particularly attractive and flexible opportunities to build a repertoire of skills and leadership practices.
Fortunately, internationally, we’ve seen a push to get principal preparation right by firmly grounding it in the broader context of leadership development. Preparation program designers have accounted for the multitude of challenges inherent in attracting, preparing, appointing, and retaining high-performing school leaders.
In Australia, a national environmental scan of principal preparation programs highlights a desire for a more cohesive, systemic approach to school leadership development, including systematic approaches to succession planning and career development pathways (Watterston, 2015). But programs still need clarity on the necessary professional learning opportunities and the rationale for each; the support needed at each level and how to provide it; and internships or other ways to gain leadership experience. This alignment also requires a common understanding of the capacities that principals need. From a school leadership development perspective, Barbara calls pathways for leadership support the three Ps: (1) pipeline, (2) personalization, and (3) partnerships.
1. Pipeline: Identification, preparation, and ongoing development (creating a networked pipeline that enables aspiring leaders to step forward through varied, flexible, and diverse pathways underpinned by expected practices)
2. Personalization: Diagnosis and precision learning (recognizing and developing strengths, creating aspiring leaders’ leadership identities, and matching professional learning opportunities to identified needs)
3. Partnerships: The power of the profession (mentoring, role modeling, and work shadowing)
So what can you do to prepare more women for—and add the feminine archetypal values to—school leadership?
WORDS FROM A LEADER
We’ve created avenues for professional development and career growth through a coaching module and a network of support. We have academic directors and school coaches—many of whom are women—who are the support network for our teachers. Through my leadership, we have created a council of academic directors who provide support to a group of seven to fifteen schools. Stellar teachers become mentors, mentors become school academic coaches, and school academic coaches become regional or group academic directors. This career ladder provides a structure and process for women to become leaders at their school and in their region. Our coaching module contains comprehensive content to improve our coaches’ knowledge in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and team dynamics. We are proud of the quality of leaders we are generating to mentor, coach, and encourage others in our efforts to build capacity within our organization. (Karen Gayle, national director of curriculum and instruction, Imagine Schools, United States, personal communication, April 17, 2018)
Leadership development is a collective responsibility. Review the following leadership development reflections and strategies from the perspective of the individual leadership aspirant, the profession and the role it plays in supporting and informing leadership development, and the system (your sector, district, or central office) in providing the enabling conditions to articulate career pathways and ongoing capacity building. What else would you add to the list?
• Address the readiness gap: Systems need to get women into leadership positions—not by using quotas or favorable selection processes, but by getting everybody to the starting line. Like athletes in the hundred-meter sprint, each potential leader requires a different training regime to get to the starting line. That way, it’s open to the best person to win the race, but individualized training provides each person with a chance to win.
• Counter the belief that the principal role prevents women from directly impacting learning: Women who take temporary positions as acting leaders frequently change this belief; they realize they can have a significant impact on more students if they lead. These interim opportunities address preconceived ideas and demystify the role.
• Promote flexible work options for all: Career breaks are a good thing; they promote a diverse view of school leadership and provide return-to-work and family-friendly work patterns. There are numerous pathways to senior leadership positions. Systemic practices regarding family leave, education sabbaticals, part-time positions, and other options can have a significant impact on the way people perceive opportunities for progression. The point is to do whatever it takes to effectively engage your most talented, creative, and committed educators.
• Research the impact of merit and equity practices and selection processes, and increase career management support for women: Ensure appropriate training for those involved in the selection processes. Women may lack the confidence to articulate their achievements or may see this as blowing their own trumpet. Some also assume others will see their achievements without their having to explicitly articulate them for selection processes.
• Provide access to high-quality leadership programs: Many systems have tinkered at the edges but not had a holistic career view or sense of responsibility to develop their school leaders. Think about formative student assessment that, in partnership with teacher and students, identifies learning needs, strategies to address those needs, and regular checkpoints to reflect on growth and understanding; likewise, you should diagnose before prescribing professional learning so it targets and meets diverse and identified needs. One size does not fit all. Doing this requires determining what school leaders need to know, understand, and do to succeed in their work (for an example, see the Australian Professional Standard for Principals [AITSL, 2016]; the Ontario Leadership Framework [Leithwood, 2012]; and the 4DTM Instructional Leadership Growth Continuum [University of Washington Center for Educational Leadership, n.d.]) so aspiring leaders can identify their strengths and challenges and inform their performance and professional learning conversations. Review the examples from Australia, Canada, and the United States. What do they tell you about the role of the school leader? What would you focus on to develop your leadership capacity?
• Remember that women are less inclined to consider leadership roles unless someone suggests it to them or they become the accidental principal: Current principals have a significant role to play in not only providing positive role modeling but also seeking, recognizing, and supporting the development of aspiring leaders (including those who don’t know their own leadership potential). Principals can do the following to show women that they should consider leadership roles.
∘ Principals should be their own best advocates by articulating and displaying an obvious sense of job satisfaction; this goes a long way toward demystifying the role.
∘ Talent spotting may require education leaders to look beyond their leadership comfort zones to encourage people not like them and explore and develop others’ leadership potential (Spiller, 2017).
∘ Mentoring, coaching, and support networks are critical to engage, invigorate, support, and sustain women in their leadership journey. Current leaders of all genders need to take on the crucial role of sponsoring potential leaders to open up opportunities, guiding aspirant leaders in how to be strategic in leveraging their allies to advocate on their behalf with a more explicit focus on career progression.
These strategies contribute to developing women’s confidence and resilience so they feel able to drive their careers forward. Everyone has a role to play in leadership development.
