Study done by: Charol Shakeshaft, Genevieve Brown, Beverly J. Irby, Margaret Grogan, and Julia Ballenger
Introduction
This chapter examines the research on gender equity in educa-tional leadership published since 1985. Since the numbers ofwomen in educational administration have remained very smallcompared to the numbers of men in educational administration, the research on gender equity has focused on women.There have been some gains at the central office level and in theelementary principalship, but the majority of educational leaders in schools and districts are still White men. Many of the stud-ies investigating this problem over the past two decades havecontributed knowledge of women’s experiences as principalsand superintendents to the existing literature on educationaladministration, which was largely written about and by men. Inparticular, scholars have targeted the barriers to women inschool administration, career paths of women administrators,and women’s leadership styles. These categories are littlechanged from the literature reviewed in the previous chapter on“Strategies for Overcoming the Barriers to Women in Educational Administration” (Shakeshaft, 1985) in the Handbook forAchieving Sex Equity through Education.1 Women still dominate the teaching forces from which leaders are recruited, and,as the following studies confirm, women prepare for leadership in degree programs, and aspire to the positions. This research has tried to understand better what it will take for leadership po-sitions in PK–12 settings to become more equitably distributed. The postsecondary chapter addresses administrative genderequity issues in higher education.The studies reviewed in this chapter include all empiricallybased dissertations and research published since 1985 that wewere able to locate. Studies included range from samples of oneto samples of thousands and include quantitative, qualitative,and historical inquiries. The organization of this chapter was guided by the previous Handbook for Achieving Sex Equity through Educationchapter on women in leadership.
Representation of Women in School Administration
Comparing the representation of women in school administration “20 years later” is not as easy as looking up the numbers. As was true in the mid 1980s, documenting women’s representation in formal leadership positions in schools continues to bedifficult because of the absence of reliable and comparable dataeither nationally or within and across states. Because no federal or national organization, including the National Center forEducation Statistics, collects or reports annual administrativedata by gender—let alone by gender and ethnicity combined—there is no easy way to compare the representation of women inadministration by position from year to year. Currently, the fieldrelies upon membership counts in administrative organizations,occasional surveys by these organizations, or occasional surveysby the National Center for Education Statistics to report the per-centage of women in administrative positions in public and private schools.2
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