Women In Pk-12 Educational Leadership: Identity And Insight

Abstract

Personal experiences. 81 Opportunities to lead. Childhood experiences. Family background. Pivotal moments. Mentoring. 90 Encouragement by others. CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION Imagine you belong to a group of people who possess many great qualities and characteristics, such as intelligence, compassion, dependability, cooperativeness, determination, imagination, ambition, courage, caring, maturity, loyalty, self-control, and independence. Then, imagine you are never given a chance to show and use those gifts in the world, rarely permitted to contribute to society in a productive manner with those qualities, and looked upon with bias that inhibits your participation as a human being. The thought that this ignorance is possible in our world today may be unsettling because, logically, a person with all of those traits should be allowed and should be given the opportunity to shine and present himself or herself in the best possible way. Unfortunately, that basic, deserved opportunity is not presented to women in educational leadership. That fact is not new and it is not unstudied. A great number of researchers have studied women and leadership in society (Shakeshaft, 1989, etc.). An April 2017 search of "women and leadership" in the dissertations catalogued by ProQuest, a wellknown research database, reported 376,515 results, citing abundant research on the topic. Countless articles, books, blogs, institutions, meetings, and think tanks exist to study the subject of women and leadership in the world. While acknowledging the large amount of studies and other information about this topic, it is logical to question its importance. Women account for over half the population of the world, but continue to be under-represented and often ignored in virtually every aspect of living. Women have proven themselves to be effective leaders, but continue to be dismissed and discounted. Pondering about these issues is not a new pastime; since the time that humans were able to speak and write about it, hundreds of writers, scholars, and activists have questioned, analyzed, and found that women and leadership is a worthwhile subject upon which much time should be spent. For example, in 391 B.C., Aristophanes offered Assemblywomen, his play about women coming to power in government and the relationship between war, power, and gender (A. & Henderson, 1998). In order to comment about social issues, Shakespeare often placed his female characters in different roles, sometimes ones of power and leadership. As this proposal is submitted, women and leadership are still observed, questioned, hotly debated, and written about (Zenger & Folkman, 2012). Research Problem However, despite the aforementioned facts about coverage of the topic, there is a gender problem in educational leadership. Despite progress towards sex equity, there is a lack of women serving as educational leaders in the pre-kindergarten through 12th grade levels (PK-12) as evidenced by recent statistics reported by various, reputable researchers and organizations, such as the American...