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