Educational Leadership and Gender

This entry examines the role that gender has played in the selection of leaders as well as in the way leadership is carried out. Gender adds a diverse perspective to the traditional White male world of school administration.

Since the beginning of the 20th century when school administrator hierarchies became the dominant organizing framework in U.S. schools, educational administration has been dominated by White men. As the levels of the administrative hierarchy increased, the number of women obtaining administrative positions decreased. Although opportunities for administrators of color were available in racially segregated schools, many of those opportunities disappeared with the school desegregation that followed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Although women have been overrepresented in elementary teaching and slightly underrepresented at the secondary level, those proportions have not been replicated in administration in the past 80 years.

Tyack and Hansot refer to the period from 1900 through 1930 as the “golden age” of women in educational administration; at its peak in 1928, 55% of elementary principals and 25% of county superintendents were women. Although women held proportionately more administrative positions in the second decade of the 20th century than in the second decade of the 21st century, women were clustered in lower status positions, while secondary principalships and district superintendencies were more often held by men. Even in the same position, women were less powerful within the system and earned substantially lower wages than their male counterparts.

After 1930, women in administrative positions began to decline, as schools fought against the employment of married women and looked for male educational leaders. World War II and the Vietnam War provided additional administrative jobs for women as many men left employment and joined the military. Nevertheless, once these wars ended, men increased their domination of administrative ranks.

Documenting the gender representation in administration had always been difficult, leading to the charge of a conspiracy of silence that prevented a true analysis of the underrepresentation of women in leadership and thus masked inequities. Beginning in the 1980s and continuing today, there has been a renewed push toward more equitable representation and more consistent data.

Reporting strict proportions is difficult for a number of reasons: Publication lags delay the reporting of data from 1 to 5 years; administrative titles across states are often not easily comparable; and tracking the gender representation of school administrators is not a high priority of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the official federal agency for education data collection and analysis in the United States. By 2010, the proportions of women in educational leadership positions are growing, with the largest growth occurring in the elementary principalship, then middle and high school principalships, and finally at the superintendent level.