Women in Positions of Leadership in Education

I want to side track from my questions for this post and address my curiosity about some articles and conversations I had this week.

After reading a classmate’s response to The Contradiction and the Challenge of the Educated Woman, I found a question that really baffled me.

Why in a profession dominated by women are the majority of positions of “power” (i.e. principal) dominated by men?

I remember when I was a child all of my principals being men. I remember in high school we had a female vice principal and I remember thinking that was pretty cool. At my past teaching job over the 7 years I was there, there were 2 male principals, 3 male vice principals, and 1 female vice principal (me).

So, I decided to ask a few teacher friends what they though about this and do a little research myself.

“I think that the traditionally feminine professions... have been immensely devalued because women have been devalued for many of years” -WNA (school counselor)

Another friend (JL-primary educator) said that she thinks there is a hesitancy in females towards roles of leadership because, “although teaching is a very feminized, gendered role, (in a patriarchal kind of sense), when it comes to leadership, the qualities from a post-modern, patriarchal perspective, those traits for leadership are counter to what the traits are for educators”

I did a little digging trying to find statistic on this. I found a lot of statistics from the United States but didn’t find many from Canada. From the Canadian Teacher’s Federation I found a statistic from 2002-2003 that stated that the average percentage of women across Canada that were in the role of principal was 39.5%, and in some provinces was as high as 48% and 51%. This is still surprising considering the ration of men to women in our profession in 2020/21 was roughly 100 females to every 32 males (Statistics Canada, 2022).

(Alberta Teacher Association, 2018)

The most recent stats I could find related specifically to BC was a newsletter from 2020 for the BC Principals and Vice Principals Association. In the newsletter it showed that 59.2% of their members were female and 39.9% were male. Now this is just membership, there are probably many principals and vice principals that are not members. Regardless, when I saw this  number in made me realize that women are making moves in positions of power and being leaders for educators.

(BCPVPA, 2020)

So, have we made changes in regards to women and women’s rights? Yes. Do we still need to make more? Probably. Are women happy with their positions in the world? I’m not sure. I guess it just depends who you ask.

Thanks for coming with me on this side track journey, I hope it was as interesting for you as it was for me.

References:

Alberta Teachers Association. (2018). Gender and leadership. https://legacy.teachers.ab.ca/News%20Room/ata%20magazine/Volume%2085/Number%203/Articles/Pages/Gender%20and%20Leadership.aspx

BC Principals' & vice-principals' association. (2020.). BCPVP June 2020 Newsletter. https://www.bcpvpa.org/

Martin, J. R. (1991). The contradiction and the challenge of the educated woman. Women’s Studies Quarterly [Special Issue on Women, Girls, and the Culture of Education], 19(1/2), 6–27.

Maryville University. (n.d.). MVU-DEHEL-2020-Q4-Skyscraper-Empowering-Women-in-Higher-Education-Leadership-Header [image]. Maryville Educational Blog. https://online.maryville.edu/blog/women-in-higher-ed-leadership/

Statistics Canada. (2022). Educators in public elementary and secondary schools, by work status, age group and sex. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=3710015301&pickMembers%5B0%5D=2.2&pickMembers%5B1%5D=3.1&pickMembers%5B2%5D=4.3&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2020%2B%2F%2B2021&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2020%2B%2F%2B2021&referencePeriods=20200101%2C20200101