In matters both big and small, women in education leadership are treated, spoken to and viewed differently than their male colleagues. And it impacts everything from their assignments and salaries to promotions.
The career moves that are open to aspiring women leaders often propel them toward a very real glass cliff — leadership roles in which the risk of failure is high. By failing to address this bias, states and districts are constraining the rise of some of their most capable current and would-be leaders.
New survey data and research illuminates the experiences and perspectives of women who confront this bias and demonstrates the need for systemic change to dismantle the bias driving the gender gap.
The glass cliff for women is real, but it is not insurmountable. If more leaders — both women and, critically, men — take even a few steps forward, we can build a bridge to a future in which every leader can reach their full potential.
Here are some ways district and state leaders can transform the pipeline for who advances and leads their systems.
First, women in education leadership need more active support, with a shift from mentoring to sponsorship. That calls for women and men to take an engaged role in advancing up-and-coming women leaders — and all leaders, at all stages, who can benefit from on-the-job coaching.
These relationships can be game-changers, results from the first annual Women Leading Ed insight survey found. What’s more, they provide excellent opportunities for men to be allies in advancing gender equality.
Related: Widen your perspective. Our free biweekly newsletter consults critical voices on innovation in education.
For example, Kyla Johnson-Trammell, the superintendent of schools in Oakland, recently recalled having a male coach when she started out. He served as her sponsor, providing coaching and introducing her to other experienced leaders.
“When I started as superintendent of Oakland Unified School District, one of the former superintendents called me. This man coached me for two years every Friday,” Johnson-Trammell recounted. “He helped me and pushed me to be the leader I wanted to be as a Black woman. . . . His sponsorship helped open doors to accessing people, it helped me to connect to other superintendents.”
Second, rebalanced evaluation, promotion and hiring processes can be key levers in undoing bias. That means creating diverse applicant pools and hiring committees and providing bias training for those making key personnel decisions.
Seemingly small changes can have big effects. For example, having a finalist pool with two women candidates — instead of just one — made the likelihood of a woman getting hired 79 times greater, recent research in the Harvard Business Review found.
More broadly, the existing education leadership pipeline continues to disadvantage women. Data from the U.S. Department of Education shows — and the Women Leading Ed survey results verify — that women are predominantly funneled toward elementary school leadership and instructional leadership pathways that keep their trajectories below the top jobs in the district or state.
Men, however, are elevated to high school principalships and district positions that include fiscal or operational roles — precisely the kind of experiences that are prioritized during superintendent search processes.
The Women Leading Ed survey results underscore this divergence. Of respondents who had been principals, fewer than 20 percent served in a high school. Overall, just over one in 20 respondents had held finance or operations roles.
In one response to the survey, a woman who was a senior leader in a large urban school district described the bias of the skewed leadership pipeline succinctly: “I was told I’m too petite to be anything but an elementary principal.”
Third, bolstered family and well-being supports are essential to advancing more women leaders. These include parental leave, childcare, eldercare time and scheduling flexibility.
Rising to top district leadership positions comes with costs for women that are typically not shouldered by men.
Respondents to the Women Leading Ed survey reported feeling pressure to overperform professionally to prove their competency. Fully 95 percent of women superintendents believe that they must make professional sacrifices that their male colleagues do not, the survey data show.
Some women reported working long hours while neglecting family, under pressure to maintain unrealistic expectations at the office. One pointed out the additional responsibilities that women often carry in their personal lives, including the care of children or parents, attending and organizing school events, providing homework help and taking family members to doctor appointments.
Related: OPINION: We need more women in top leadership positions in our nation’s public schools
Added pressure at work and greater responsibilities at home lead to burnout: Roughly six out of 10 survey respondents said they think about leaving their current position due to the stress and strain; three-quarters said they think about leaving daily, weekly or monthly.
Providing high-quality benefits can be a key lever for addressing these underlying gender inequalities. So can offering flexible work schedules, hybrid work arrangements and remote work options that provide elasticity in where and when work gets done.
Finally, systems — not just individuals — must be accountable. Setting public goals for female leadership on boards and in senior management is a start. Reporting on progress toward those public goals is vital. So too is ensuring equal pay for equal work.
More than half the superintendents surveyed said that they have had conversations or negotiations about their salaries in which they felt their gender influenced the outcome.
One solution: establish audits for pay equity and increased transparency around compensation. Another: include salary ranges in job postings. These can be powerful steps toward the goal of pay equality.
Over 700 leaders have signed Women Leading Ed’s open letter calling for the adoption of these strategies. The strategies are already taking root through the advocacy and actions of women in education leadership and their allies of all genders.
It is a movement that is both growing and vital, as research makes clear that women continue to face a different set of rules than men in leadership, and districts too often give women window-dressing roles instead of actually reforming their practices to achieve gender equality.
The time for change is now.
Julia Rafal-Baer is the founder and CEO of Women Leading Ed, a national nonprofit network for women in education leadership, and co-founder and CEO of ILO Group, a women-owned education and policy strategy firm.
This story about women education leaders was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
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In matters both big and small, women in education leadership are treated, spoken to and viewed differently than their male colleagues. And it impacts everything from their assignments and salaries to promotions. The career moves that are open to aspiring women leaders often propel them toward a very real glass cliff — leadership roles in
The post OPINION: Women education leaders need better support and sponsorships to help catch up appeared first on The Hechinger Report. Elementary to High School, Opinion, Solutions, Data and research, Law and policy, Leadership, Principals, teachers The Hechinger Report
