As I was reading through the list of TED talk choices in the leadership category, I came across the title “Why we have too few women leaders” and stopped there. Being a woman, I thought it important for me to know why we have too few. Although this talk didn’t offer solutions to the problem and didn’t have anything to do with education, I did find it interesting and, unfortunately, the message was all too true. As Sheryl Sandberg stated, we live in a different world than our mothers and grandmothers. More women work today than ever before and there are more opportunities for women than ever before, but women still seem to have difficulties getting into leadership roles or being taken seriously for leadership roles. The most disheartening fact that Sandberg gave was that women tend to sabotage themselves when it comes to moving up into leadership roles.
At the beginning of the school year, my principal announced that he would be retiring at the end of the year. A search committee was formed and the advertising and interviewing process began. A couple of things stuck out during this process, but the most disconcerting one was that there was a group in our school community that did not want to see a woman as principal. They didn’t think that a woman could do as good a job running the school as a man could. What made it worse was that many in this group were women.Even though we had a group of people who were of the mindset that a male leader is better than a woman leader, a woman was chosen to lead our school.
When I look at the schools in our city and in the Diocese of Lafayette and I think of Sandberg’s comments about women being left out of many leadership opportunities, I have to wonder if this holds true in education. As far as I can tell, there are as many, or more, women in principal roles than there are men. Why? Is education considered more of a field for women? I think it is obvious that there are more women in teacher positions than there are men, so does it stand to reason then that there would be more women in administrative roles or are women finally making their way into administrative roles?
Hello Gayle,
ReplyDeleteMy question comes from having little or no background in the Catholic faith. What part do you think that faith plays in the view of women as leaders within the Diocese? I am very curious about how the intersection of faith values impacts the school setting.
Does faith play a part in defining not only women's roles, but what success is or should be? I chatted with an individual who was employed by a Catholic school in our area. She expressed the view that she felt her school viewed teaching as a calling. She indicated that salary structures and benefits (or the lack thereof) were a direct result of this perspective and that to some degree teachers were expected to be altruistic and sacrifice in this area to reach their higher calling. I had truthfully never thought of it from this perspective.
Anne