Educational leadership: A feminist critique and reconstruction

We now have fewer women heads of educational institutions than we had in the first two decades of this century…. When women move into male areas, they remain clustered at the lower levels, marginally represented at the middle levels and absent from the top other than the occasional deviant, nonconformist, articulate, pioneer. On a national scale there are fewer than 3% women heads of mixed institutions in education. (Byrne, quoted in Sampson, 1983, p.52) The structural barriers can be seen in the cultivation of young male teachers in appropriate administrative and organisational tasks, while in the first five years of teaching, many women teachers concentrate on child centred tasks. In this way, authority in schools becomes linked with masculinity and leadership in education takes on a masculine image. (Sampson, 1983)